Genesis 22.1–19 James 2.14–24
A sermon preached at Geraldton Anglican Cathedral 26th January 2025
One thing you can say about the Bible: It is never what you expect—the amount of stuff you think should never be there, that preachers have somehow to explain away. But this is what gives it the ring of truth. Stay with it, and it makes sense, not the kind of sense the world looks for, but something humans would never have invented. Today we are looking at God’s command to Abraham to take his son up the mountain and sacrifice him. Pretty weird, don’t you think?
Shortly after we arrived in South Africa—it was a Sunday night—I headed off down the M5 to Kenilworth. I stopped for a hitchhiker on the side of the road, and asked where he was going. He said he was going to a sacrifice. I must have raised my eyebrows; I didn’t know then that South Africa’s Muslims do a lot of sacrificing—so do the Indonesians; it’s why there is such a live sheep trade. Anyway, tis chap didn’t wait for me to answer; he said it was a girlfriend’s twenty-first and they were going to sacrifice for her. Then he went on to explain to me how God had told Abraham to sacrifice his son—Ishmael, he said. I raised my eyebrows again. He told me the story enthusiastically and in detail. South African blacks, coloureds, and Afrikaaners like to talk about God; only the English South Africans steer clear.
Anyway, it got me interested, so I looked up the story in the Qur’an and also in the ancient Jewish targums, and was startled by the similarities. Exchanging Ishmael for Isaac was not unexpected, but other similarities made it plain that Muhammad had taken the Jewish interpretation and adapted it for his own people. Both versions focus attention on Isaac’s courage. “Bind me tightly, father,” Isaac says to Abraham, who is about to cut his throat. “Bind me tightly, lest I shake and the sacrifice be spoiled.” Isaac is a courageous hero. But there is nothing like this in Genesis.
In Haran God told Abraham to go to “the land I will show you,” and promised to make him a great nation. Every time he spoke to him over the next twenty-five years it was about this great blessing, but now he speaks again:
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.
Wow! Once again Abraham sets off to a place God would show him, but this was very different. They have hung out twenty-five years for this boy. He is the love of their life, and the hope of their future, and God really rubs it in.
… your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love and offer him as a sacrifice …
The Bible tells us nothing about Abraham’s inner struggle, Though it must have been a tough time. A young couple contacted me about baptizing their first child. I went to their home to talk. When I explained what it means to have Jesus’ as Lord of your life, the wife burst out, “If he took my baby, I would hate him.” They didn’t go ahead with the baptism.
But God has spoken and what can the disciple do? The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Most of us faced with such a thing would doubt it could be God speaking; doesn’t the Bible forbid human sacrifice? It does; I doubt we would go through with it. But Abraham knew it was God speaking, and it was not so impossible that he might demand such a thing. The ancients sacrificed, and sometimes they sacrificed humans.
Sacrifice of one kind or another was practiced everywhere in the ancient world. To us it seems strange, but think for a moment. They didn’t have refrigerators, and the slaughter of an animal meant a glut of meat and an opportunity for feasting with family and friends. When I arrived for the first time at the homestead of Peter Kalangula in Ovamboland, there was a large animal tethered to a tree. “That’s your ox,” Peter said. Later, there was a shot, the animal collapsed and Peter’s men got to work butchering it. Peter then took me around Ondangwa. Everyone we met was invited to come to eat meat that night. That was not a sacrifice; Peter Kalangula was a Christian, but for someone who worshipped idol-gods—you had to keep them happy. And there was nothing the gods enjoyed more than the smell of cooking meat. Sometimes sacrifices were gifts to the gods, but often they were apologies, if you thought you had offended. Either way, the bigger the sacrifice—the more it cost you—the more effective it was likely to be. This is where human sacrifice came in.
Agamemnon was king of Greece. The Greeks were about to sail for the Asian coast to make war against Troy, and rescue the captured Helen. Day after day a storm raged; it was impossible to sail. The gods were clearly angry. What to do? The seriousness of the situation called for the sacrifice of something precious. Iphegenia, the king’s daughter, was burned by the seashore. The storm died out, and the fleet set sail.
So, what was the most precious thing Abraham could be asked to give up?
Isaac was more than a beloved son; he was the child of promise, the child who was born when his mother was ninety years old. For twenty-five years he had been longed for—a miracle child when he was born. Surely he was the answer to God’s promise that one of Eve’s children would one day crush the Devil’s and release the human race from the curse.[1] He would have been revered as a holy one—and if he died—well, people would pray to him, as they do to saints and ancestors even today. His death would have been regarded as propitiatory. What do I mean by that? Sacrifices were frequently offered for forgiveness of sin. The gods were angry with you; what could you do to placate them? Propitiation is what you do to make an angry, god friendly or happy. It is also called atonement. There is a modern example of atonement in Alistair Maclean’s, HMS Ulysses, a story from WWII of a British destroyer on the Arctic Run. The ship was under repeated attack from bombers from the Norwegian coast. In one raid, when the men ran to their gun position and started firing, the gun exploded; everyone in the crew died, except the sailor who was meant to remove the cover from the gun-barrel and had forgotten. His burden of guilt was unbearable; when the next attack came, he rushed to one of the guns and kept on firing until the dive bombers cut him to pieces. Only so could he atone for what he had done.
Sacrifice, as I said, was universal. But in Israel God gave it a new meaning. Sin is real. Guilt is serious. Instead of the drugs and psychotherapy that we use, God gave Israel an orderly system of sacrifice. It was not up to them to wonder what they should do to appease and satisfy a god who may have been angry not because of anything you had done, but simply because he was having a bad day, or thought you had it too good; the ancients lived in a state of uncertainty and anxiety, as do those who worship idol-gods today. God told Israel that he was angry, and exactly why; their evil-doing had offended him. And he told them exactly what they should do. A lamb, a goat, a ox—there were different sacrifices for different things—sometimes the animal was killed and burnt in entirety—the holocaust, or whole burnt offering, was for very serious sins—at other times the animal was killed and the meat shared out among the worshippers. There were sin-offerings, and guilt-offerings, and fellowship offerings; most of them dealt in some way with sin. The animal died, and you went free—the animal was a substitute for what you deserved. It was not a matter of how much the sacrifice cost; the poor could offer a small bird. You only had to be sure the animal was free of any blemish; a damaged victim was not acceptable to God.
People often complain to me about the preoccupation with sin in Anglican services. For example, they won’t use the funeral service in the prayer book any more, because it focuses on our sin; surely, we should be celebrating someone’s life. What is so serious about sin anyway? A modern rewrite of our story would have Abraham standing up to God, and asserting his independence.
But when you turn away from God you turn away from life. God is the source of all life, and if you turn your back on him, you are dead. To be independent of God is impossible. The worst sinner, though he or she doesn’t know it, is sustained in countless ways by God. Even our existence—if God were to cease willing us to live, we would cease to exist. That is why our prayer book pleads for God’s mercy. Every death should remind us that the world is under a curse. It is a fantasy to think you can be a part of God’s universe and ignore him. For the moment he holds back the inevitable and sustains us—by rights we should not exist—but it cannot be for ever. Sin is turning away from God; sin leads to death. But come back with me to Abraham and Isaac.
When God speaks, clearly and unmistakably, the disciple must obey, whatever the struggle. “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away.” The one who gives life has the right to remove it.
“Abraham went, as the Lord instructed him.”
That’s all the Bible tells us .
And Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So they went both of them together.
It is the only time Isaac speaks; there is no hint that he is anything but puzzled. They build the altar and lay out the wood; only then does Abraham seize his son and bind him with a rope. And there is nothing about Isaac’s reaction. So where does the spotlight fall? Firstly, on Abraham’s obedience; he passes the test. Secondly, Abraham is restrained from killing his son by the voice of an angel calling from heaven. Caught in the bushes by its horns is a ram, which Abraham sacrifices in place of his son.
Abraham’s faith is tested, and he comes out clean. Nothing could stand between him and God, not even his most precious possession. But as it happened, God did not require it, and Isaac is ransomed at the last moment by the offering of a ram for sacrifice.
So Abraham called the name of that place, “The LORD will provide” (Jehovah Jireh); as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided.”
This is the clue to the importance of the story. Something is to happen in the future that answers to the substitution of an animal for the boy. The place where this all took place was Mount Moriah, where in later days the temple would be built and on God’s orders spotless animals would be offered in sacrifice, day after day, year after year, as reminders of the seriousness of sin.[2]
Far from Isaac becoming the powerful sacrifice that would atone for the sins of others,[3] his life was also forfeit. He was not the spotless lamb whose death would have propitiatory power; he needed to be ransomed himself. What happened to Isaac was a pointer to what would happen for many when God provided “on the mountain of the Lord.”
But here, Hebrews also tells us these sacrifices were not magic; they were symbolic, with no power in themselves to do away with sin. They witnessed to the seriousness of sin, and pointed to something—but what?—something that God would do, that would really deal with the problem of sin.
The story of Abraham’s temptation became for Israel the answer to human sacrifice. There is no such thing among humans as a spotless victim, not even a king’s undefiled virgin daughter, however beautiful. There were times in Israel’s history when they were drawn into the worship of the gods of surrounding nations, who practised human sacrifice. In the time of King Manasseh there was a temple to Molech in the Valley of Hinnom to the south of Jerusalem.
And they have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind. (Jeremiah 7.31)
It was one reason Canaan “vomited out” its inhabitants, and God destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BC.
Isaac could not be the spotless lamb. He was “spoiled goods,” needing to be redeemed, like every other human born into the world. An animal died in his place. And the lesson taken is that God will one day provide for sinful humankind: Jehovah Jireh (Yahweh Yireh), “on the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.”
The sacrifice of Isaac—what Jewish people call the Akedah—was a mystery until God did provide, not in the symbolic way of animal sacrifices, but by giving his only Son to die for the sins of the world.
In a parable Jesus told less than a week before his death, a man plants a vineyard and rents it out to tenants. The tenants stop paying the rent. The owner sends various servants to collect, but they are mistreated and sent away. Finally, he sends his son.
He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally, he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’[5]
Jesus is aware that he is to be the “beloved son,” the sacrifice Isaac could not be. He, a human man, yes, but a sinless man and the king of his people, and also the eternal God who has become a man, will offer himself to take responsibility for all the evil humans have done since the beginning of time and stand in their place.
He is the spotless victim, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, the only one whose dying would have such power that it would atone for the sins of the world. As the Prayer of Thanksgiving in our Communion Service puts it:
… he made there by his one oblation of himself, once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world …
Just as Isaac’s sacrifice did away with human sacrifice—no human could be the spotless substitute for another’s sins—so Jesus’ once-and-for-all sacrifice did away with animal sacrifice. He did what the death of animals prefigured. And wherever the story of his death on the cross has been told, people have ceased to sacrifice animals for their sins. There is no need. We can live in a sacrifice-free world because of Jesus’ “full perfect and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.”
So, if your friend is turning twenty-one, by all means organize a BBQ—even roast a sheep. But there is no need to think the slaughtered animal will bring her forgiveness, or blessing, or good luck. It has no power at all, and is an insult to God if you are thinking that way. Rather, pray! Pray for her to the God who gave her life, and redeemed her by the once and forever sacrifice of his own beloved Son—and who rose from death and lives to hear his children’s prayers, and intercedes for them before his Father.
[1] Genesis 3.
[2] Hebrews 10.
[3] Some of the Jewish rabbis saw it this way, even though Isaac die.
[5] Mark 12.