Is God worth trusting?

Genesis 22:1-15

1 After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” 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.” 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. 4 On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. 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.” 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. And the two of them walked on together. 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?” 8 Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them walked on together.

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. 10 Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. 11 But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” 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.” 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. 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.”

What are we to make of the story of Abraham and Isaac at Mt Moriah?  Perhaps you could fear a God who would demand child sacrifice - a sacrifice of which the point is to prove devotion to that God - but how could you ever love such a God?  Even if you “believed” in that God, might not the appropriate response be to renounce any relation to a father that would subject his children to such emotional trauma?  

Perhaps the heart of the problem is the vast disparity between how we’ve been taught to think about God and how this story presents God.  We are taught (for good reason) that God is omnipotent and omniscient, all-powerful and all-knowing - that this is part of the very definition of what it means for God to be God.  And yet, in this story, the force that drives Abraham and Isaac up that mountain to the edge of the unthinkable is God’s need to know what God apparently doesn’t already know.  God needs to know if Abraham fears him, if he can trust Abraham.  

Why does God seemingly doubt?  We can only assume that God vetted Abraham before making extravagant promises to bless him and make him the father of an innumerable people.  It’s true that Abraham had some shaky moments - denying that Sarah was his wife out of fear of those who coveted her, taking Hagar as his wife and fathering a son  when it seemed Sarah never would - but that would seem like water under the bridge by the time Isaac, as promised, has been born in their old age.  But God still has some concerns. 

So he puts Abraham to the test, telling him to go up the mountain to offer Isaac as a burnt offering.  It is precisely the reticence of the story, the lack of detail generally (but the inclusion of other striking details) which create its poignancy.  Upon receiving this instruction Abraham does not speak; he gets up the next morning, saddles his donkey, gathers some wood, then sets out with Isaac, to whom he explains nothing.  The two leave the servants behind and set out on their own.  Isaac says “Father! ..The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?”  To which Abraham replied, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.”  These are the only words the speak to one another, in this story - and in the whole of the Bible.  

Interpreters have often found in these words Abraham’s reply a declaration of his trust that God will - as God in fact does - provide a lamb, that Abraham is confident it will never come to the point of striking Isaac.  Such an interpretation aims to mitigate the horror of what Abraham is prepared to do (though spare a thought for Isaac), but in fact the text says that Abraham does raise the knife to slay his son - who, as far as the text is concerned, suffers his fate in silence - before the angel intervenes at the final moment.  Indeed, Abraham understands that Isaac is the lamb God provided, and that God can take as well as God gives.  Although finally Isaac is spared, Abraham passes the test precisely because he shows himself willing to kill his son - and having demonstrated intent there is a sense in which he’s already committed the deed.  

Even for those who know this story well, there is a sense of relief that comes when the voice calls out and the ram is substituted for Isaac, but for Abraham there is no going back to the time before he intended to kill Isaac.  (It’s anachronistic to expect the text to address the psychological trauma or the subsequent relational dynamics between Abraham and Isaac, but we can’t help but wonder).  

God discovers that he can trust Abraham - but, despite the happy ending, how could Abraham ever trust a God who would ask such a thing? 

Just last Sunday we read in Matthew where Jesus declares,  “whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me,”  o we might be especially inclined to make that the moral of this story - that true faith in God requires radical obedience to whatever God demands, that everything else, however valuable, is worthless compared to the infinite worth of God.  The danger here is that we divorce our relationship to God from our relationships to one another, that faithfulness becomes less about what we’re willing to do for people and what we’re willing to do to people.   There is definitely a current in religion broadly and in Christianity especially where moral seriousness is indexed to the willingness to commit violence (rather than to suffer violence). To say that nothing matters but God sure sounds a lot like nihilism.  Though, to be fair, if God is the sort of character who might see fit for us to kill our children, then questions of morality can seem an unnecessary distraction.  

Child sacrifice was a disconcertingly widespread religious practice throughout the centuries, and indeed it is just the extreme end of the logic of sacrifice in the OT.  You appease God, please God, atone for your sins, through sacrifice, and the greater the sacrifice the greater its efficacy.  The OT includes prohibitions against child sacrifice, but the very need for a rule suggests that it was happening - or could.  This story seems to wrestle with the logic of sacrifice, concluding that God, finally, does not require such an offering, that righteousness is not attained by dramatic gestures; the final verdict is that “Abraham trusted God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.”  

It would be a mistake, I think, to cite this passage as a character reference for God, but to the extent that God’s character is revealed here, the remarkable revelation is that God trusts Abraham, that God’s plans and reputation depend on Abraham’s trustworthiness - and this reveals the nature of God’s relationship to creation, to humanity, to us.  God trusts us that we might trust God.  If God merely wanted our fear, this would be unnecessary, even misguided, but God, first loving us, establishes the kind of trusting relationship that is a precondition for a loving relationship.  In a manner of speaking, we might say that God takes a risk, as loving someone always is.  

But Abraham has also risked everything for God, he has trusted God’s promises, and the crux of this passage is how to proceed when these promises seem in doubt.  God has promised Abraham that he would make him a great nation, a promise that required granting Abraham a son in his old age.  But now God asks Abraham to kill Isaac, which raises the obvious question of just how God is going to keep his promise if Abraham follows through.  Abraham couldn’t help but fear that obedience to God imperiled the fulfillment of God’s promise - even that God is going back on his promises, that to trust God reveals that God is untrustworthy.  

In this respect the faithful (however meager that faith) are always like Abraham.  We are those who, however imperfectly, have trusted God’s promises but inevitably find ourselves in situations where we doubt if God will indeed follow through, where it seems impossible that God could get us from here to there.  We believed God’s promise long ago, but was that a mistake?  Yet we’re too far down the road to turn back, so what are you going to do?  The point of the passage is not to highlight the choice before us and encourage us to be like Abraham.  The point is that, finally, there really is no option other than to trust God. Either God keeps his promises or God does not.  

And the moral of the story is not so much, “Look, God was faithful to Abraham so God will be faithful to you”, but more, “like Abraham you’re going to reach a moment of crisis - or perhaps your life will be lived in crisis - and you’ll just have to trust God even if and when God’s promises seem most in doubt.”  God tested Abraham, but Abraham also tested God, and he had to be willing to lose it all to find out.  As Jesus said in last week’s passage, “those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”  

Of course, it is Jesus whom this passage foreshadows.  He is the son who, like Isaac, silently suffered his fate.  When we ask the question, “how could God ask Abraham to kill his son”, the proper theological response - though not exactly an answer - is to consider why God would offer his only son to be killed on our behalf?  

Though this is a very modern way of framing it, the story of Abraham and Isaac addresses the very nature of life on Earth, of the nature of existence itself, where we are born to die, and in the meantime find ourselves in painfully impossible situations along the way.  The understandable temptation is to question the morality of the God who would put us here in the first place.  

And the only way to make sense of that question, is to trust that God can bring life even out of death.  Abraham trusted (or, at least, proceeded as if) even the death of his only son could not thwart God’s promises, and who thus welcomed his son back from the dead, as it were, so the Father trusted - and perhaps that really is the right word - that he would receive his faithful Son back from the dead as well.   To be human is finally aways inevitably to sacrifice everything - to bring a child into the world is always to be separated one way or another - and the only thing that prevents despair is the promise of resurrection, that somehow God is going to make it right.  And it’s only when we accept that everything is a gift that we can truly receive it; only when we’re willing to lose everything that we can truly live.