“In a world of child sacrifice this might have been an effective way to give a very specific message.”

What kind of God controls this world you speak of? If you hurt the least of these…..? And Jesus according to yall represents the father. Seems like theological smoke and mirrors.

I can understand that, but it means for me, literally today, that I may be asked to do something that SEEMS wrong, but God will actually step in with the solution at the last minute. In ancient Greek plays they called that “deus ex machina” or “god out of the machine” in which an impossible situation was solved by a “god” who came in at the last moment. Usually, the Greeks used a big mechanical crane device to accomplish this–hence the name.

I don’t believe God works this way… I see it nowhere else in scripture (I mean allowing us to believe we are supposed to do something wrong… and then saving us from ourselves at the last minute). I think God’s ways are God’s ways, and I’m okay not understanding them, but I do believe that God doesn’t lie, that he doesn’t deceive, that he isn’t a “trickster” (to borrow from other pagan archetypes). I’m just still grappling with what this story DOES teach about my practical living and relationship with God.

Perhaps the “grappling” part is the point. We aren’t given clear, easy do-it-yourself sorts of answers. We must grapple with God in order to follow him seriously.

Thanks for your helpful comment!

That has been a very satisfying interpretation to me.

Still

“In the new covenant there is no reason to believe that God would ask you to kill an innocent child. ”

Unless your Joshua.

You said…

“The purpose of this story is threefold: to establish Abraham as a model for obedience and faith; to demonstrate that God keeps his promises to Israel; and to dramatise the difference between the “old” religion of Abraham’s ancestors and the henceforth “new” religion of Abraham’s descendants.”

… and then went on to detail a very clear interpretation of the story.

I think some of us have a problem with exactly HOW we are to read this. What I mean is this: If I were to talk academically about the meaning of, say, the Epic of Gilgamesh (an ancient Sumerian / Babylonian / Assyrian myth) then I might take the same tone… ie: “The purpose of this story is to show…”

Do we read this as a “mythic” story with deep significance? Or, do we read this as a documentation of what a God-follower thousands of years ago actually said and did? OR… do we somehow read it as BOTH?

I have no problem seeing the mystical, theological significance of the story– it’s packed full of that like nothing else in the Bible! But when I place myself in the story… like it was something that might have happened last week, or last year, or 500 years ago… or 3000 years ago… then things get tricky. It’s suddenly lifted out of the realm of archetypes and into the realm of reality.

“There was this young boy once whose father heard a voice and believed it with all his heart. So the father took his boy and tied him up and placed him on a rock and began to slice his throat…”

Difficult, very difficult outside of the realm of symbolism.

“Scott,
In the new covenant there is no reason to believe that God would ask you to kill an innocent child. ”

Unless your Joshua.

Abraham’s ancestors had “served other gods,” (Joshua 24:2) such service often including child sacrifice, so there would be an understandable conflict in his mind. Was the voice of ancestral custom, the voice that now told him to sacrifice Isaac, the same voice that had promised “through Isaac will all the nations be blessed?”

Abraham demonstrates obedience to the voice of his ancestral gods by setting off to perform the sacrifice. The journey towards the place of sacrifice symbolises progressive revelation of the one, true God e.g. the God who called Abraham to Canaan would not renege on his promises; both he and Isaac would return; God would provide the lamb; even if death were required, his God could raise from the dead (Hebrews 11:17-19.

So Abraham’s faith in the power of God is established and his absolute obedience extolled and rewarded, even though the particular act of obedience is explicitly repudiated, both then (by the angel of YHVH) and later (by Micah and Jeremiah).

I think if I heard that loud voice telling me to kill an innocent child, I’d assume it might be someone other than God– and NOT because I’d say “God doesn’t talk to us that way anymore” but because I’d know that killing innocents isn’t HIS nature.