Hebrews 11:17-19 - By faith Abraham offered Isaac as a sacrifice

11:17-19

We now move back to Abraham himself, this time with reference to God testing him with the sacrifice of Isaac. This story is extremely interesting. Most commonly when the incident is talked about there is an emphasis on how terrible this must have been for Abraham. Indeed, the text itself does stress the momentousness of what Abraham is being told to do. Gen 22:2 says “take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love”. However, when we read the chapter we see that there is no hesitation nor questioning on Abraham’s part, and in Gen 22:5 he tells his servants that he and the boy will return, then in Gen 22:8 in response to Isaac’s questions Abraham tells him that God will provide the lamb. This is quite different from the way Abraham has behaved in the previous twenty or thirty years, where, as well as faith and obedience, there have been times of doubt and questioning.

A second issue that is often raised in relation to this is why would God tell Abraham to do this, to sacrifice his son. Isn’t this a terrible thing to do, even an evil thing? At the start of Gen 22 it says “God tested Abraham ...” Now was God seeing if Abraham was good enough? Surely not! Rather God knew the work that He had done in Abraham. Abraham had truly become a man of faith, of complete and utter faith (Gen 22:16-18). Back to Hebrews, it says that Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead. Isaac was not just Abraham’s son, he was God’s promised son to Abraham, and the one through whom His promises would be fulfilled.