The Abraham Paradox

Genesis 22:1-13

The Untitled, Open-Ended Study Bible

Rev. David Collins

July 12, 2026

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Today we get to Genesis 22, and in the last chapter, chapter 21, Isaac was finally born. The promise God made to Abraham twenty-five years earlier, that he would have a son, that his descendants would be more than the stars in the sky, that through him all the families of the earth would be blessed…that promise finally has a name. Isaac. He laughs. That's what his name means. Because when God told Sarah she was going to have a baby at ninety years old, she laughed. And then, holding her baby, Sarah says, “21:6 God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.” 

And then, in the very next chapter, God tells Abraham to kill him.

Listen to how God says it in verse 2. "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.”

Now if you've been in church long enough, you've probably heard some explanations of this story. Maybe you were told it's a story about faith. About trust. About how Abraham was willing to give up the thing he loved most, and because of that, God gave him back. 

Maybe you heard that the point is that we should love God more than we love the good things God gives us. Or that this is God testing Abraham the way a teacher gives a pop quiz, and Abraham aced it.

Some of those readings have a long tradition behind them. Some of them are more thoughtful than others. But I want to walk through them today, and I want to walk through the problems with them, and then I want us to read the actual story together and see what we find.

Because this is one of those texts where the standard answers have done a lot of damage.

So let's start with the readings you've probably heard.

Simple Explanations

The simplest one goes like this. God tells Abraham to do a hard thing. Abraham does it. God rewards him. The lesson is: do what you're told, and you'll get what you need. God asks for your best, and if you give it up, God gives it back.

I don't want to be too hard on it, because sometimes when people don't know what to do, "just obey and trust God to work it out" is the only handhold they've got.

But it's not really a reading of the story. It's a moral extracted from the story. And once you've got the moral, you don't need the story anymore. And you can get that lesson from lots of places in the Bible. 

There's a more sophisticated version too. It goes like this. Isaac wasn't just Abraham's son. Isaac was the promise. Isaac was everything Abraham had waited for, everything he'd staked his life on. And God was testing whether Abraham loved the gift more than the giver. 

You'll hear this one from serious preachers. Kierkegaard has a whole book about it. But the lesson of "want God more than what God gives you,” is just a hop, skip and a jump away from “don’t love anything too much, or that’s what God is going to make you give up.”

And that's not how love works. 

There are other readings floating around too. Some say the whole story is God's way of showing that he actually doesn't want child sacrifice, unlike the gods of the surrounding nations. I don’t think that’s what’s happening here though. 

But notice what all of these readings have in common. They're all trying to protect God's reputation.

And I get why. If you love God, you don't want people walking away from a story like this thinking God is a monster. So you explain what it “really” means, so nobody gets the wrong idea.

But here's the thing. God doesn't need us to be his public relations team. God can handle his own reputation. And when we spend all our energy defending God from the story, we turn God into an idea instead of God. You could even say that we take God much more seriously than all the super certain people do. 

So let's stop defending God for a minute, and let's take the problems seriously.

Problem 1: Children are not property. 

A careless, surface reading of this story contributes to an atmosphere where child abuse can be justified in the name of God. And that's not an ancient problem. That's a right-now problem.

Just this year I read about a parent defending her decision to let her child die of a disease he could have been vaccinated against. 

“How many Christian parents have withheld medicine from a sick child because they were convinced God would heal them. How many parents have declared their own child dead to them for marrying the wrong person, or for coming out. Many Isaacs have been laid on the altar of intolerance by parents who were sure they were being faithful to God.” (De La Torre)

Problem 2: Might Doesn’t Make Right

If Abraham's willingness to kill his son is the model of faith, what are we teaching people to accept? What are we teaching wives to accept from husbands? What are we teaching soldiers to accept from generals? What are we teaching kids to accept from parents and pastors?

There are seeds of fascism in the Bible. And there always have been. Because human beings are always tempted to hand our moral reasoning off to someone else.

That's what fascism runs on. Someone in charge does the moral reasoning for you. And once you've handed it over, you're free. Because if the guy in charge tells you to do something bad, then it isn't bad. It's just what you were told to do.

A story like Genesis 22, read carelessly, gives people exactly what they were looking for. It says the highest form of faith is doing what you were told. 

Which brings me to problem three.

Problem 3: Religion is Dangerous

Religion is one of the oldest things human beings do, and it carries stuff forward from times when we believed things we now know are horrifying.

Like child sacrifice. Which wasn't a fringe practice. Across the ancient Near East, people burned their children on altars because they were convinced the gods needed it. They believed it worked.

We don't do that with knives and fire anymore. But we shouldn't kid ourselves that the impulse is gone. Because we are still biologically cave people. Our brains haven't changed. But our tools have. Which makes us more dangerous, not less.

Kent State Memorial

Here's an example almost none of you have heard of. In 1978, an artist named George Segal was commissioned to make a memorial for the students killed at Kent State. You remember Kent State. May 4, 1970. Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed students protesting the Vietnam War and killed four of them.

Segal made a statue of Abraham with a knife, standing over a bound Isaac. Isaac as a young college student. Bare chest, hands tied.

Kent State rejected it. They said the Abraham and Isaac metaphor wasn't appropriate. One administrator suggested Segal replace it with a semi-nude young woman using her feminine charms to deflect a young soldier from firing his rifle. I promise I'm not making that up.

So the statue went to Princeton instead. It sits by the chapel there today.

But the reason Segal made it is the reason I'm giving this sermon. Because the older generation sacrificing the younger generation isn't an ancient story. It's the story of every war. And of a country that still sends its children into schools with active shooter drills, because it can't bring itself to give up its guns.

Religion is where we go to make sense of things like that. And sometimes to make excuses for them. 

It's in our theology too. A whole lot of Christianity is built on the idea that God the Father had to sacrifice his son. Had to. That there was a legal debt of wrath God needed to satisfy, and the only way was to kill his own son.

You don’t need to believe that to be a Christian. Despite what you may have heard, that is not the gospel. 

So what do we do with a story like this?

Some people just skip over it. 

But I think that would be a mistake. Because the Bible isn’t a book of bedtime stories, or rules for living. It’s not terms and conditions that we click, “I agree” on. 

It’s a process. 

The Bible is meant to form us our souls, to turn us into moral beings who can tell right from wrong, and stand up under spiritual pressure. 

God doesn’t want people who just obey. God wants people who obey because they trust. Who are open and present and walk forward knowing that things don’t always make sense at first.  

Which is the only way to make sense of Abraham in this chapter. 

So let's actually read it.

Genesis 22:1 After these things God tested Abraham. 

The word "tested" here is the Hebrew nasah. It can mean tested. It can also mean tempted. Same word.

That matters because tested sounds like a school exam where the teacher already knows the answers. Tempted sounds like something else. Something where God might actually be trying to find out what's inside Abraham.

Walter Brueggemann says this story doesn't work if we treat it as a formality. It only works if God really wanted to know. If God didn't already have the answer before Abraham did. 

And I know that already makes some of us uncomfortable. We were taught God knows everything before it happens. We'll come back to that.

For now, just notice. Whatever this is, it's real.

He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” 

That's one word in Hebrew. Hineni. It's what Moses says at the burning bush. It's what Isaiah says when God asks who will go. Hineni. Here I am.

Keep an ear out for that phrase. Abraham is going to say it twice more before this is over.

2 He said, “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 that I shall show you.” 

This is the first time the word "love" shows up in the Bible. The very first time. It's the Hebrew word ahav, and it hasn't appeared once before this. Not in creation. Not in the garden. Not with Noah. Not anywhere.

The first time the Bible ever uses the word love, it's God putting it in Abraham's mouth to describe Isaac. Before anything else the narrator stops and tells us that Isaac is loved.

The first love in the Bible is a father's love for a son. And the whole rest of the story has to be read through it.

3 So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. 

4 On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. 5 Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.” 

6 Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. And the two of them walked on together. 

7 Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” 

There's the second hineni. Same word as verse 1. And now Isaac finally asks the question we've all been waiting for him to ask.

He said, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” 

Isaac isn’t stupid. He knows what a sacrifice is. He knows what's on the checklist. Fire, wood, knife. Lamb. And they've got everything except the lamb.

8 Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” 

Walter Brueggemann has a great line about this verse He says,

 "Abraham finds his only refuge in the divine provider whom he finds inscrutable but reliable."

Inscrutable but reliable.

Inscrutable means Abraham doesn't understand this God. Doesn't know what this God is doing. Can't make sense of what this God is asking. There is no explanation coming. There is no version of this that makes sense on the way up the mountain.

But reliable means Abraham has walked with this God long enough to know something else. That even when God is impossible to understand, that God is still good,

You can hold both of those at once. In fact, you kind of have to, if you're going to keep walking.

That's the God Abraham is trusting when he says, "God will provide."

He's not saying he's got it figured out. He's saying he's staked his whole life on a God he cannot explain, and he's not going to stop now. And notice what happens right after he says it.

And the two of them walked on together.

Together. Same word as verse 6, before Isaac asked the question. They were walking together before, and they're walking together after. The question didn't split them apart, and neither does the answer

Now I don't want to over-romanticize this. Isaac still gets tied up in the next verse. Abraham still picks up the knife.

But when Abraham walks that last stretch of the mountain, he isn't walking alone. He's walking with a son he loves. Toward a God he cannot understand, and will not let go of.

9 When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. 10 Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. 11 But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” 

That's the third hineni.

Verse 1, when God first called him. Verse 7, when his son called him from behind him on the mountain. And now verse 11, when the angel calls him with the knife in his hand.

I don't know what to make of that. On one hand it's a beautiful thing, that Abraham is still present, still not hiding, all the way to the top of the mountain. On the other hand, a person who keeps saying "here I am" all the way to the altar might be somebody who's stopped asking whether he should be there at all.

I'll let you sit with that one. Because I don't think the text settles it.

12 He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” 

13 And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.

So God stops it, and provides a sacrifice that was there all along. And if we were just reading this story for the moral, I guess that would be it. But we’re not. There’s one more morsel to chew on in verse 12. 

12 He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God

Now I know.

Which means before, God didn't know. God is telling us, right here in the text, that God actually needed to see this play out to find out what was in Abraham. Not what he'd say. Not what he'd promise. What he'd actually do win this impossible situation. 

Remember at the beginning, when we talked about the word tested? Nasah. That it can also mean tempted. Tempting shows what it you, for good or for bad. That’s what just happened. It wasn’t about giving the right answer. It was showing what’s in Abraham’s soul. 

God is telling us that this whole thing was for real. And that the not-knowing was real too. 

And that's a problem for the Christianity many of us grew up with. Because we were taught God knows everything before it happens. It's called omniscience. And it came into Christianity centuries later, mostly through Augustine and Aquinas, who were reading Greek philosophy at the same time as the Bible.

But the God of the Bible learns things. The God of the Bible changes his mind. The God of Genesis 6 is sorry he ever made humanity. The God of Exodus 32 has to be talked out of destroying Israel by Moses himself. And the God of Genesis 22 didn't know how Abraham would respond until Abraham responded.

Which changes what the whole story has been about. Because if God already knew, then none of it counted for anything, because God already had the answer.

But if God didn't know, then every step up that mountain was a choice Abraham was actually making. His trust was actually trust, not a script. It mattered that he showed up. It mattered that he didn't hide.

And it matters that we don't hide either.

Because your yes to God is something you're actually giving. And your no is something you're actually withholding.

That's what the text is telling us. Now I know. God knows now, because Abraham showed him.

But there's something else the story is showing us. And it’s not a moral. It’s a paradox that we live in as people who know God through Jesus Christ. 

The Abraham Paradox

God gave Abraham a promise. A son. A future.

And then God commanded Abraham to sacrifice the fulfillment of that promise.

The promise and the command are opposed. Not just hard to reconcile. Actually opposed. 

To keep the command, Abraham has to lose the promise. To keep the promise, Abraham would have to disobey the command. At first, there seemed to be no path where he gets both.

So Abraham was stuck. Because both the promise and the command came from the same God. That's the paradox at the heart of this story. And I think it's the paradox at the heart of the Christian life.

Because God gave us a promise too. The Kingdom is coming. God's will is going to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Every tear wiped away. The lion lying down with the lamb.

And then Jesus told us how to live in the meantime. Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek. Give away what you have. Refuse the sword. Bless those who persecute you.

The command looks like the opposite of the promise.

Because the promise is a Kingdom. And the command is to live like a lamb in a world full of wolves.

To keep the promise the way the world understands promises, you have to break the command. You have to grab. You have to fight. You have to win. 

We are living in the wake of people doing that right now. 

And when you do that, you've stopped being the kind of person God can bring the Kingdom through.

But if you keep the command, if you really do love your enemies and refuse the sword and give away what you have, the promise looks impossible. Because the world does not reward that. The world crucifies that.

Every Christian has to figure out what to do with that paradox.

And many of us cheat. We take the promise and we drop the command. We tell ourselves God needs our help. That the Kingdom needs our sword.

But those of us who don't cheat find out something strange.

We find out that the paradox isn't a problem to be solved. It's a place to be inhabited.

Because when you keep the command with everything in you, and you hold the promise with everything in you, and the two things are pulling you apart, something happens in the middle of the pulling. God shows up in the space between the two.

Not as an answer. As a presence.

God is not found where things make sense. God is found where things break open. Where the promise you were sure of gets asked of you, and the command you were sure of asks the impossible, and you can't reconcile them, and you don't run.

You just stand there.

Hineni.

Not, "I know the answer." Not, "I have this figured out." Not, "I am sure this is right." Just, here I am.

Here I am, in the tension. Here I am, without a resolution. Here I am, with the promise in one hand and the command in the other, and both of them from you, God. Here I am.

That word has been the answer of every faithful person in the Bible when God called their name. Not because they had it figured out. Because they hadn't run. They just said, here I am.

And that is where God meets us. Not on the other side of the paradox. Inside it.

The people who have known God the deepest have almost always been people who lived inside an impossible tension for years. Abraham on the mountain. Jacob wrestling by the river. Job on the ash heap. Mary at the foot of the cross. None of them got a clean resolution. All of them got God.

So this morning, church, hear the good news.

You do not have to solve the paradox.

You do not have to reconcile the promise and the command.

You just have to stay in the room with both of them and not run. When God calls your name, all you have to say is here I am.

Amen.