The Big Dilemma
Genesis 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 of which I shall tell you.”
Genesis 22 takes us into the quintessential moral dilemma at the heart of the Bible, and we’ll spend the next three days just trying to cover something of the mystery of it. For starters, we need to remember that Abraham is living in a time before Mosaic laws and Levitical liturgies and meticulous worship instructions, which explains why we find him decrying God’s judgment of Sodom in Genesis 18—“Shall not the judge of the earth do what is just?”—but remaining silent here as God asks him to sacrifice his own son. He doesn’t know better. He’s living before 2 Kings 21 and he hasn’t yet learned that child-sacrifice is a ‘despicable’ abomination to Holiness. See, Abraham’s act of faith is pure here, but the deed itself isn’t. And because of that, God must stop him from going through with it.
Friend, take comfort in the truth that you’ll never have to fear God testing your faith today by asking you to offer your own kids as a sacrifice! Because you live after Christ’s Passion. You’ve learned from Calvary that God’s love isn’t child-sacrificing, but Self-sacrificing.