What if Abraham loved his son more than his God?

More like "sacrificed himself to himself." Despite the perception that God (the Father) is/was one being and Jesus another, the doctrine that there is only one God (Deuteronomy 4:6) coupled with 2 Corinthians 5:19, which reads, "To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation," basically shows the true nature of God as taught by basic Christian doctrine, which few self-professed Christians appear to understand: that the Creator God wears many masks, sometimes appearing as a human (Christ), sometimes a divine Presence within the hearts of believers, aka the Holy Spirit, sometimes as the transcendent Creator God, but all are actually one and the same being.

P2

Didn't Jesus say something like: "It is easier for a cord (mistranslated as camel) to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven"?

The question is what if Abraham had loved his FIRSTBORN son Ishmael as much as he loved Isaac. This may have prevented a family feud that's still going on today.

This is truly the question to be answered.

I think everyone has missed an obvious question here. Why would God, the all knowing, need to test Abraham at all?

Wouldn't he already know exactly what Abraham was going to do? Wouldn't he already know, even better than Abraham does, what was in his heart? Being Omniscient defeats the whole point of giving tests

For the tester Absolutly.... but what about for the tested? what if it's to show Abraham how far he would go in service to god.

hmmmm...I suppose so. And I suppose as an example to others.

But this then implies that God knew Abraham wouldn't say no. So no real risk here by God.

So many questions here..

My understanding of the passage is as follows..

First, the timeframe is important. This occurs well before the Law was handed down to Moses, when God ostensibly spoke more personally with his followers (in this case Abraham). I can draw from that that no prohibition had been placed on this sort of sacrifice (which would have invalidated the request in my mind).

Also, in examining why it was Isaac and not Ishmael, the matter is quite simple. Isaac was the son of promise, being born of Sarah, Abraham's wife. Ishmael had been born of a handmaiden, an act of lack of faith. Therefore, the promise God had made to Abraham was to be fulfilled by Isaac's line, making him especially valuable to Abraham, for whom the promise of plentiful descendents was very important.

It is also deemed by Christians as a foreshadowing of Jesus's ultimate act of mercy. Jesus is God's child of promise, so to speak.

Now one question is why God would test someone's faith if He already knows. It is a good question, and one without a super clear cut answer. My response is that by God's testing, our faith (or lack of) is thereby revealed to us, and if we respond in faith, God will use the results of the test to strengthen our faith even more.

And on a sidenote regarding the Law and the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are a summary of the overall thrust of the law. However, there are much deeper aspects to the law, with the foremost of these being the system of sacrifices put in place to cover the sins of the people before a Holy God. The argument for why sacrifices are necessary is relatively straightforward. The price for our sins is our life, which is associated with our blood moreso than any other physical thing. Therefore we owe God a bloodcost of ourselves. The sacrifices in the temple were a temporary measure, a symbolic act until God achieved the actual sacrifice necessary to pay the debt owed for good.

The seemingly contrary emphases of the Law and the New Testament are confusing to many as well. It would be my argument that the purpose of the Law was to reveal to us how we are unrighteous before a Just and Holy God. It is to impress upon on the seriousness of the matter.

But if you look through the Old Testament, whenever one of God's people came to recognize their sin, they asked for forgiveness, and God was willing to grant it to those who honestly sought it.

On the opposite side of the coin, while the NT Christian is free from the constraints on the Law, it is the expectation that they will gladly submit to God's will, and that frequently they will suffer the consequences if they stray, just as in OT times.

A Christian who treats God with disrespect, either through his life, or his words, likely isn't a Christian at all.

Some thoughts from my brain. Hope this helps some people.

Omniscient deities don't know risk. Risk implies chance, and when you're omniscient you already know the outcome, right?

To me this is probably the single greatest logical fallacy faced by believers, although there are some pretty clever dodges around it. If God is, indeed, all-knowing, then there really isn't such a thing as free will because all of our choices are pre-ordained. If we do have true free will, then God cannot be omniscient because we could surprise him at any moment.

(My actual take on that is a bit more complex, but comes down to the universe being run by the forces of chaos rather than a supreme organizational deity, and as products of that chaos our nature+nurture doesn't give us as much free will as we'd like to believe -- so I'm in the middle for different reasons).


Your post was well-thought, Geepa, but I struggle a great deal with the whole idea of "sin". I understand the need for socially constructive forces and if that hadn't been the Church it would have been something else. But the philosophy underlying your quoted comment says that humans are basically sinful creatures who require salvation. After a few thousand years of humans being shamed I think I can see the poisonous psychosis that has infected modern society because of that attitude.

I prefer to think of people as just people -- motivated for self to a great degree but also oriented towards family, community and loved ones in most cases. The core of humanity that actually prolongs the species is neither good nor evil, it's merely human. And in my view, religion has provided a rather redundant moral structure in its attempts to control human social behavior. Men do not become "good" because they believe in God --- men become "good" because that behavior springs from the same instincts that helped us to survive.

I don't believe any absolute morality exists.

We are a society which, in order to sucessfully thrive in this world, need a system of rules to be set up. Rules with which the population agrees with. As our civilization grows better, such growth should be reflected on those rules in the matter of how they help it continue to grow.

There are several schools of thought where God's omniscience and man's free will is concerned within Christianity. One camp suggests that free will is incompatible with God's sovereignty. Another tries to meld the two concepts by suggesting that God in his full control decided to allow man his own choice.

The nature of what we refer to as "free will" is one of the great religious questions in the end.

As far as sin goes, the best way to describe it I have heard is that it is missing the mark God has set for us to hit. And if one believes the Bible as divinely inspired as I do, one must hold that all men are incapable of satisfying God with our own morality. We have a heart problem we are powerless to do anything about.

However, one disclaimer I would add is that people are very rarely as bad or evil as they could be. I would say this is by the grace of God.

I also understand that there are many more like yourself who do not hold the Bible as Holy Writ. And given that there are a lot of people we would deem as being good people by our own standards (a point I would agree with), it isn't surprising in the least you might hold to either the general moral goodness or the general moral neutrality of people.

I did enjoy your response, Cindy.

What an interesting thread, and so far, missing the flames which seem to invariably erupt around topics like these

I believe important insight is shed on Abraham's faith in Chapter 11 of The Epistle to the Hebrews, a passage which I've heard referred to as "The Great Hall of Faith."



As Isaac was not yet betrothed at the time he was offered, I think the test facing Abraham was this: Was God going to make good on the promise of Isaac as the first of a great nation, or not? If so, then God must somehow solve the problem of Isaac's pending death...either before or after the sacrifice.

If not...then God was untrustworthy. Yet He was still powerful enough to be feared. Did Abraham lose faith in God at the time of crisis, and obey only out of fear of the consequences?

That's a question which the Old Testament doesn't answer on its own, as I can tell. All revelation of God's character and will prior to the life of Jesus can be argued as either authoritarian or authoritative..the key difference between the two ethoi being, to me, that authoritative rulers earn for themselves genuine high regard, in addition to the other two components of a leader/follower relationship...acknowledgement and compliance...which either authoritative or authoritarian rulers may demand.

It took the post-Cross reference to the incident to reveal (at least to my satisfaction) that Abraham looked past the command to sacrifice and toward God's prior promise, with a faith clearly of the type...if not of the purity...shown by Jesus Himself, Who "for the joy set before Him, endured the cross, despising its shame."

In other words, a faith which knew something of actual trust in the One Who demanded it, and not merely the ever-smiling, ever-cringing compliance which Earthly authoritarians so delight in exacting from their fellow human beings.

-- Ethan

My take on the Abraham story is that God was teaching Abraham the boundaries of this new religion. Earlier in Genesis, God commanded people and they either obeyed or refused to obey him. But God dealt with Abraham differently. When God told Noah that he was going to destroy the world, Noah didn't argue, he just did what God told him to do and built the ark. But when God told Abraham that he was going to destroy Sodom and Gommorah, Abraham argued with God. He called God on it. Abraham said "Will you sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?" And, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?" For me this is a sign that human beings were developing a sense of universal justice. And Abraham got God to agree not to destroy the cities if he could find 10 just men there. Just ten would have saved thousands.

So when God told Abraham to sacrifice his son, for me, it is a way for God to test Abraham's sense of universal justice. I believe Abraham failed. I believe God wanted Abraham to argue, to stand up for justice and mercy. But standing up to God isn't easy when he's standing right in front of you. For me, God is teaching mankind to stand up on its own moral feet. It is a sign that we often have to make moral decisions without a clear input from heaven. We have to trust our own sense of justice and mercy.

The good thing that comes from this story is that we know that human sacrifice is evil. That in itself might also be a reason for the story. It is so much more compelling than a simple commandment.

You have actually made a logical fallacy with this statement. You seem to be linking All-knowing with All-controlling. The two are not connected. Just because a Being may be Omniscient, doesn't mean It's controlling a person's actions. I may know how a friend will react if I say certain things, but I am not controlling their actions.

Just because God may know what we are going to choose before we choose it, that doesn't mean that God is controlling our choice. Preordained means that it's all been planned out, that God decided how we are going to react and then made us react that way. Omniscience doesn't mean preordained. You don't have to have the ability to surprise God to have free will.

For example, what if I could look into the future and see what the closing price of a certain stock was going to be. I know what price it will close at, but I don't have any control over why it will close at that price. Other factors control the price, I just happen to know what the outcome of those factors will be. I am not in control, I am just an observer.

So Omniscience and free will can exist together.

Now, having said that I should go on record with the statement that I don't think free will exists at all. It's just an illusion. Genetics and environment control our actions just as directly as a computer program dictates what a computer can and can't do. We have all been programed to react in a certain way, and are powerless to chose to act in a different manner. (Lots of scientific evidence to support this.)

This undermines the base tenets of any religion really. People don't choose to sin, they just are who they are. They really have no choice but to act the way they do. Seems unfair of God to send someone to Hell just for being who God created them to be.

I didn't commit a fallacy, I simply didn't go into as much depth as I needed. Most Christian belief assigns both Omniscience AND Omnipotence to God. Omniscience does, indeed, imply predestination since the only way to know the future would be if it were pre-set and predictable. Omnipotence implies the ability to control that future, to set it to ones' will. They are slightly different yet parallel concepts and both are based on the idea that Man is a victim, a helpless puppet at the whim of the gods.


Omnipotence (his other assigned ability) does, however. I haven't seen any conceptions of God in the Christian faith that gave him one without the other.


Now we agree


Bing and go. Actually, if God is so loving that he would sacrifice his son, I fail to connect that with a God who would condemn anyone to eternal torment for going to the wrong church- or not going at all.

Well, the argument for the incompatibility of God's all-knowing and man's free will hinges on the following argument.

We take it as a given God knows what will happen. It may also assumed that had God desired, he could have changed the outcome using any number of means. What this seems to mean in all practicality is that men's choices are subject to the will of God, and hence not truly free.

Please note that omnipotence is also assumed here, as Cindy has mentioned.

It would be my own statement that our will is enslaved to its own selfish sinful nature, and that we cannot choose what is good from God's perspective (which is very much distinct from various standards set up by the societies of mankind.)


As for Michael's idea, I would say that it is an interesting one, and would seem to have been well thought out. I would reject it though, on the basis that it places upon God dishonesty in a sense. In a sense, God would be attempting to deceive Abraham, at least for a moment, into doing something God himself disapproves of.

Would you trust a guide who tells you, in seeming seriousness, to follow a path which you know you ought not take, just to test you? You could never wholly trust anything else that guide ever said after that.

Just because God is Omnipotent doesn't mean he has to be controlling our actions. For example, I have the ability to take my dog out into the woods and shoot him. However, that is something I would NEVER do. Just because I can do it doesn't mean that I am required to do it.

Same goes for God. Just because God can control all that we do (Omnipotent) doesn't mean that God is required to do so. He can choose not to interfere if He wants. Sort of like winding up a toy, then sitting back and watching what it does on it's own.



Ahhh, an interesting thought. However the Law of Relativity (and lets face it, there is so much evidence to support it we shouldn't call it a theory anymore) implies that the future is preset and predictable.

Most people think of time as a river that flows past us as we stand stationary in it. Fluid, every changing, easily manipulated by our presence. Relativity shows it's more like a road and that we are the ones moving, time is stationary. Past, present and future are all the same thing, it's just our point of view that changes

We know what is behind us, in the past, because we saw it as we drove by. We can see what is here next to us, in the present. We can't see what is 10 miles up the road, in the future, but it's still there none the less. That gas station up there is already there, we just haven't seen it yet. We can't do anything to change the fact that the gas station is up there. The fact that it's there is set, and we can't do anything to alter it. It is possible that we might take a fork in the road and never see the gas station, but it's still there. Everything we are going to see as we drive down that road is “set” already. It's all there waiting for us and nothing we can do will change what is there.

There are some other ways that Relativity shows that the future is just as set as the past, but they are more technical and require knowledge of the Law of Relativity before they can be understood, so I won't get into them here.

So really we can show that the future is set, or “preordained” if you like, without needing to use God to do it. It can all still be random, it's just that it's all been randomly “chosen” already and we just haven't seen the results yet. But they are there, waiting for us to catch up.

I believe in God, But I think that story was medaphor and just teaches a lesson.

I lean toward the Jewish interpretation of Genesis, which doesn't include the idea of original sin. According to that interpretation we all have the inclination to good and the inclination to evil. Each of us chooses one or the other.

I don't see it as God being dishonest, but as God teaching mankind to weigh "divine" commandments against our own sense of justice and mercy. Early in Genesis God walks among us. He speaks to us face to face. Later in the Bible, he speaks through dreams and visions. I think the story is about God preparing mankind for the day when it isn't as easy to know what he would want us to do. It's like a parent teaching a child to be independent. We shouldn't always trust everything we think God tells us. Humans are fallible. We can't always tell what is divine instruction and what is human desire. Our history is littered with the horrific results of confusing the two.