Why God Asked Abraham to Sacrifice Isaac
You probably know the story in Genesis 22. God asked Abraham to lay his son on the altar and offer him as a sacrifice. Fortunately, before his knife came down, a ram appeared in the thicket to take Isaac’s place. But why did God ask Abraham to sacrifice Isaac at all?
A Bit of Context
Today, anyone claiming God told them to sacrifice a human being would find themselves on the road to prison. Because the practice is so far outside our modern experience, it’s difficult to imagine how Abraham could have responded positively to the request.
Abraham, however, lived in a completely different society. The communities surrounding his little patch of paradise engaged in human sacrifice as a matter of course. As far as his neighbors were concerned, the heavens were filled with fickle gods who controlled every aspect of their lives. In order to appease those gods, they offered something precious enough to convince them to leave the humans who lived under them in peace.
On top of that, Abraham himself knew little about the God he served. The Ten Commandments wouldn’t be invented for many generations yet. He had no Scripture to guide him. There was no synagogue he could attend which might offer instruction on serving this Elohim. He had no one with whom to even bounce the question around whether he’d heard his voice correctly. Sarah and Abraham were alone as believers and the great Elohim had so far revealed very little about himself.
One thing most people around Abraham did seem to understand was the idea of substitutionary sacrifice—telling an angry god, “Here. Take this one, and let the rest of us go.” And what would convince a deity of your seriousness better than upgrading your offering from an animal to a human? So when God asked Abraham for this kind of sacrifice it may not have seemed all that outlandish to the Patriarch.
While the type of sacrifice, may not have bothered Abraham, the particular subject God wanted on the chopping block was more of a challenge.
God Asked Abraham for Isaac
Abraham had waited until he was one hundred years old to hold his promised heir in his arms. Oh, he’d had temporary heirs before. His servant Eliezer had held the position briefly, for example. But Eliezer wasn’t Abraham’s son. Ishmael thought he’d inherit for the first thirteen years of his life. But he was only Abraham’s son, not Sarah’s.
When Isaac came forth from Sarah’s womb, Abraham drove Ishmael far away. He pinned all his hopes for a future and a family on Isaac. And he held those hopes for a long time. When Genesis 22 opened, Isaac had grown into adulthood. We tend to picture Isaac as a young child in this story, but the Hebrew for the word “boy” in verse 5 is a tricky one to translate. Biblical scholars paint him as no younger than twelve. Adam Clark even suggests in his commentary that Isaac may have been thirty-three years old when God asked Abraham to sacrifice him.1
Now, if it had been me waiting a hundred years for a child and watching him grow for another thirty before hearing a voice asking me to strike him dead, I’d have been on the phone asking all my praying friends to help exorcise the devilish thought.
Not so with Abraham. He apparently hopped up bright and early the very next morning and set off to obey.
God Asked Abraham to Obey
Just what did Abraham believe about Elohim that enabled him to agree to this plan? Hebrews 11:17–19 gives us a couple of clues.
“By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said, ‘In Isaac your seed shall be called,’ concluding that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead, from which he also received him in a figurative sense.”
These are telling verses because we see right up front that Isaac wasn’t just a son. He was the son. When he’d first set off for Canaan, God had promised to make a nation of Abraham (Genesis 12:2). Nations weren’t conglomerations of unrelated people as they are today. They were made up of family relations. So if Abraham was going to father a nation, he’d have to father a family first. The promised seed wasn’t going to come from Isaac unless he survived and produced children of his own.
The second clue is in the odd statement about Abraham “figuratively” receiving Isaac from the dead. How did Abraham even believe God raised the dead? When had he ever seen him do that before?
The answer is a few verses back in Hebrews 11:12. “Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born as many as the stars of the sky in multitude” (emphasis added). In other words, God raised Isaac up from two dead people. If he did it once, Abraham had reason to believe he could raise Isaac up from a different type of death. Years of experience had taught Abraham God delivers on his promises. If that’s what it was going to take to bring his promise to pass, he believed Elohim not only could but would do such a thing.
That helps us understand how Abraham could go through with the plan, but why put the old man through such an ordeal?
Two Stories. Two Different Endings.
God has always been a storyteller. He tells his stories with words sometimes, but other times he tells them through his creation or even human history. So let’s examine the plot points of Abraham’s sacrificial moment.
Isaac was not coerced by his father to climb the mountain and lay his life down. He was a full-grown man who carried the means of his death to the altar. There’s no indication the father had to tie him down. If Isaac wasn’t a willing participant, he could have easily resisted his father and walked away.
The scene, of course, echoes Jesus’ trip to the cross. He said himself he could have called on legions of angels to deliver him, but he didn’t 2. Abraham and Isaac were painting a picture of what God intended to do for the nation he was bringing forth from Abraham. God would watch history’s clock tick away before bringing his own only son to the world. Then he’d watch him grow up before asking him to carry his own cross up the hill. Jesus would be a lamb led to the slaughter, opening not his mouth until his own father took his life away.
The Twist in the Plot
The ram in the thick became both part of the plot and the plot twist itself.
When he told the story with Abraham and Isaac, God made sure the ram would die instead of the son. When he repeated the story with Jesus, no ram appeared to save the son. Turns out Jesus was the ram in his story.
Abraham’s God proved he was different from the other gods. Their sacrifice came from the hands of their followers. Yahweh made himself the sacrifice provider. The offering he required would not come from his people’s hands but from his own. He and his only begotten son would walk up the hill of Calvary together. The Father would slay the only man good enough to satisfy his requirements for justice. Yet he would raise his heir from the dead so his seed would survive to give birth to a nation of priests and kings for the Father who sacrificed him.
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