Many thanks to Merry for his (?) comments on the post about Abraham. He said:
'Seems to me that the difficulty we have understanding this story, reveals our lack of faith in God. If we are completely sure that God is all-loving and all-wise, then we will know that whatever He asks us to do is glorious, no matter how strange it may seem to our puny minds. And everyone will benefit, including the sacrificee.'
Of course, Merry is right. However, a question arises: what reason did Abraham have for believing that God is all-loving and all-wise? After all, he was surrounded by cultures who worshipped gods who were at best capricious and at worst cruel. Now, it's true that the God of Abraham had brought the patriarch to a new land, so that was some warrant for his trustworthiness, but I still think it possible that when Abraham heard God's command to sacrifice Isaac he may have feared that his God was, in the end, not so different from the other gods that haunted the land and people. After all, those gods would all require some sort of payment for bringing Abraham into the Promised Land.
What I think is worth emphasising is that God's gift of the Promised Land to Abraham is a free gift. He doesn't require payment in blood for it. And is there not, perhaps, an element of Divine humour to it all? It's not hard to imagine the payoff line, as the knife is stayed: 'I had you there. You really believed I wanted your son's life.'
After all, up until then mankind really had believed that it could buy favours from the gods, with gifts and sacrifices, and the bigger the gift or sacrifice, the bigger the favour. But with Abraham the story takes the first step towards turning around. God gives freely, without sacrifice on Abraham's part. And later the story takes an even more unlikely turn: God sacrifices Himself on our behalf.
How impossible that would have seemed three millennia ago, when children were 'passed through the fire' to buy the favours of Moloch.
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