The Agony of Abraham

First Argument

When skeptics complain bitterly about the so-called “Judaeo-Christian mythology,” one of their most frequent objection is to the incomprehensible cruelty of God as depicted in the story of Abraham and Isaac. What kind of a God is it, they ask, who would instruct the good man Abraham to offer up his son, a victim of sacrifice, as proof of Abraham’s slavish obedience to the Creator?

The objections do not stop there. What kind of God is it who causes the first born of the Egyptians to die so that Moses could force the Pharaoh to let the Jews out of Egypt? What kind of a God is it who orders the Jewish army to commit ‘genocide’ against the people of Jericho in order to create a homeland called Israel? What kind of loving God would rain fire on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah for their crimes against nature?

First Reply

To the skeptic these complaints amount to an insurmountable obstacle to believing that the God worshiped by Jews and Christians is anything but a heartless and cruel deity (like all the other heartless and cruel deities of history) who deserves contempt rather than adoration. This argument is offered again and again as proof to Jews and Christians that, from the start, their religion was never anything but an exercise in tyranny justified by an imaginary Deity more demonic than the people who worship Him.

Nobody can deny that it must have sorely vexed Abraham to hear the request God had made of him. How does one kill one’s only beloved child? The demand seems perverse. But it is evident that Abraham has thought this through. It was a test by God to see if Abraham’s faith was pure and indomitable. Because He is omniscient, God knew that Abraham’s faith was absolute, and therefore put him to the test.

But when Abraham passes the test, he also will know that his faith is absolute and that he is worthy to be the founder of the chosen people by whom the Savior (God’s own Son) will be sacrificed on another bloody altar of wood. Isaac is saved from the sacrificial knife, yet Jesus must die with a spear thrust into his side. God the Father did not ask of Abraham what he would not ask of himself, the ultimate and voluntary sacrifice of God the Son, so that Adam and Eve could be absolved and all souls after them could be saved.

Second Argument

But then the skeptic goes on to ask, why does there have to be a sacrifice at all? Why does Jesus have to die in order to appease the Father’s call for a sacrifice? Why can’t God just forgive the sins of mankind without the sacrifice? This is a perplexing question that those without faith cannot begin to answer.

Second Reply

Those who have faith, however, can see the need for the sacrificial victim in Jesus. What Jesus came to show us was two things: not only God’s justice (retribution for the original sin of denying God’s authority in favor of the Serpent’s) but also His mercy. How else could the Father teach us about mercy without his own Son giving the lesson on the cross? Since God is love (I John 4:8), and since love should be proven before it can be believed to truly exist, Jesus proved it by teaching love first of all when he showed his mercy in the miracles performed for the sick and even for the raising of Lazarus.

But most importantly, Jesus proved his mercy by telling us that there is no greater love than that a man lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13) And this laying down of his own life is precisely what the Son did to prove that he could practice what he preached. Without the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the world by now would surely be in a far worse state than it was before Christ entered it. Christ as King brought truth and hope and love into a world at that time tyrannically under the sway of false gods and the Prince of Darkness.

The God of the Old and New Testaments is not a merciless monster. When the Jews under the command of Moses fought and triumphed over the Philistines, they trusted God and did what He commanded. The tribes they conquered and displaced were notoriously evil. The skeptics who protest the God of the Jews and the Christians do so because they want to make out that Abraham’s God is no better than all the other evil and false gods of history.

The Lesson

The Old Covenant ended and the New Covenant began with that wooden cross and the holy God-Man nailed to it. Supreme justice and supreme mercy were revealed in the same event when the earth quaked beneath lightening and thunder on a dark and desolate hill. Abraham and Isaac only prefigured that event. One has merely to look at a crucifix to decide if we have a hateful or loving God, and whether our trust in God, agonizing as it may sometimes be tested, is as perfect and unflinching as Abraham’s.

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