Another story that seems horrific. All sorts of questions arise, how does God even ask such a thing? How can Abraham even contemplate such an act? What might God ask of us?
Bruggemann suggests that our understanding of God is as a tester at the beginning of the text and as a provider at the end, is the frame within which we must read this story. Earlier theologians also struggled, “Calvin says. ‘The command and promise of God are in conflict.’ Luther says, This is a ‘contradiction with which God contradicts himself.”
v1 “Some time later” – Isaac is old enough to carry the wood, and to know what constitutes a sacrifice.
v2 Ishmael has been forgotten, “only son”
relationship is recognised “who you love”
v3 Abraham had argued for the lives of the people in Sodom – but here he obeys without any argument. Is this faith or blind obedience?
“God is shown to be freely sovereign just as he is graciously faithful. That God provides shows his gracious faithfulness. That God tests is a disclosure of his free sovereignty.”
v5-9 Is Abraham carrying out God’s orders but excepting intervention? The narrator does not let us in on Abraham’s emotions, just tell us what is happening – the emotion is for the reader to imagine.
v10 Parallels with Job? “Like Job, Abraham is prepared to trust fully the God who gives and who takes away (cf Job 1:21).
“Neither the Joban poetry nor this Abraham story are about evil or the justice of God. Rather, they ask about faith which as Kierkegaard has shown, drives us to dread before the self is yielded to God.”
“It is evident in Exodus 20:20, Deuteronomy 8:16, 13:3,33:8 that testing is a common theme for a time of syncretism, like the Ahab-Jezebel period (cf 1 Kings 17-19). The term testing (nasah) is prominent in Deuteronomy, which faced syncretism most directly. The testing of Israel by God is to determine if Israel will trust only Yahweh or if it would look at the same time to other gods.”
v 11-14 God provides. “To assert that God provides requires a faith as intense as the conviction that God tests… In a world beset by humanism, scientism, and naturalism, the claim that God alone provides is as scandalous as the claim that he tests.”
“Abraham’s obedience, though difficult to understand at times, is active not passive. He accepts and he responds. He does not initiate because it is God’s plan that is unfolding, not his. If that plan is to be brought to completion, and if Abraham is to play any part in it, he will have to accept the role into which he has been cast and trust the one whose story is being told – and that one is God.” Dianne Berget
v15-19 Promise repeated.
v20-24 a family tree – and Rebekah is introduced. More on her next time.