WOULD YOU KILL YOUR
SON TODAY IF GOD ASKED YOU TO?
“...If
any of us saw a twenty-first-century Abraham raising the knife [at his
child] on the roof of his apartment
building, we would call the police; we would wrestle him down; even if we saw
him lower the knife at the last minute, we would expect the Department of
Children and Family services to take Isaac away and charge Abraham with child
abuse.”
The above are the words of former US
president Barack Obama in his book The
Audacity of Hope; page 220, brackets mine.
To “expose” what they think is moral
inconsistency or capriciousness or even absurdity of the Christian God,
sceptics and atheists often ask, “If God asks you to kill your child today,
will you do that?”
Other underlying assumptions of this
question are that:
1. Sceptics have a higher moral standard
than the God of the Bible who, in their judgement, is simply bloodthirsty.
2. Christians who would follow through
with all of God’s command—including killing one’s child for Him—are dangerous
to the society.
3. Christians who wouldn’t follow through
with this kind of command has to admit that the Bible is not God’s inerrant
word.
This moral and rational superiority
complex of sceptics is simply a show of their wilful ignorance; for they,
having no regard for God’s moral principles, challenge God’s holiness while
exalting themselves above God by the same standard they refuse.
Nearly all cultures in the world were
barbaric and practiced one form of human sacrifice until they encountered
Christianity. Anywhere the Gospel penetrated, it put a stop to homicide. Same
is true with Judaism. The nations among whom the Jewish patriarchs sojourned
used to sacrifice one another to idols, and it was normal for them. In fact,
God said that this is a chief reason for which He dispossessed them of their
lands and handed them to Israel (Jer. 19:5; 32:35). And when Israel sinned in
such manner, He drove them off the land into captivity.
So why do sceptics consider God’s
demand of Isaac as though they themselves had known righteousness without the
influence of God? Their question by which they seek to undermine God’s moral
values is therefore lame, for all through Scripture God abhorred shedding of
innocent blood, let alone requesting it as sacrifice.
The question is much like a pagan who has
been impressed by Christ’s teachings on the sanctity of sex and marriage and
therefore decides to live as celibate. Imagine such a fellow turning round to
challenge the holiness of God by asking a Christian, “If God asks you to commit
fornication, would you do so?” The question is both stupid and hypocritical. It
is stupid because we already know the holiness of God. It is hypocritical because
the fellow would have continued in his former culture of promiscuity and
barbarism had it not been for God’s prevailing influence over him; why does he
now act “holier than God”?
Therefore it is useless for sceptics
to stage this line of argument against Christianity because we already know
that “God is of a purer eye than to behold iniquity” (Hab. 1:13). It is the
devil that asks people to shed blood for self-gratification. Our God is holy,
and that the sceptics well know.
But someone would ask: Why then did
God ask Abraham to sacrifice his son for Him? Why did He test him thus at all?
First, it is important to note that
neither Abraham’s household nor the people among whom he dwelt would have
thought that the old man was out of his mind. The question the people would ask
was not whether it was morally right. No, they wouldn’t ask that because they
themselves where wholly given to barbarous idolatry which involved human
sacrifices, whereas Abraham was the holiest man they ever saw. And the question
wouldn’t be whether Abraham truly heard from God. No, because Abraham’s
intimate relationship with YHWH was self-evident: He was the one that led him from
Mesopotamia to that land; God made him like a prince among foreigners; Abraham
had been a prophet to them all; even his change of name from Abram to Abraham
was everyday prophecy that he’d surely father a child with Sarah, though they
were barren and age-stricken; King Melchizedek had publicly testified that the
old man’s intimacy with God was second to none among all living; on and on the
testimony goes.
So for these two reasons—the pervading
idolatry in the land and Abraham’s relationship with God—none would think of
Abraham’s action as odd. It was purely a question of faith, both as Abraham’s
household and the pagan neighbours would consider it, whether or not Abraham
would give back the son to the One who evidently gave him the boy.
The birth of Isaac is just as
miraculous as procreation by a decaying cadaver. Such a miracle God did! So why
do people think that giving Isaac back to God was an act of murder? No, Abraham
didn’t think so. And if you were Abraham, you wouldn’t think so too.
The test was whether Abraham would
believe that even though he loses the child to God that God was going to
miraculously bring him back in order to fulfil the promise He made concerning
the child. It goes without saying, therefore, that God would bring back the
child in order to remain the infallible God He’s reputed for. So the test is
whether Father Abraham would look beyond his momentary loss and grief and
rather trust in God’s infallibility and omnipotence.
By faith Abraham, when he was tried,
offered up Isaac: and he that had received the promises offered up his only
begotten son, of whom it was said, That in Isaac shall thy seed be called: accounting
that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he
received him in a figure.
— Heb 11:17-19
Till today God expects every Christian
to offer up our Isaacs. The sceptics should stop asking whether we would be so
irrational to sacrifice our relatives to God if He asks us to—they should stop
imagining if both we and our God can be so “irrational”—because He has already
commanded us to do that. And every true Christian surely obeys that command
daily. Here it is, the Lord says:
If any man come to me, and hate not
his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea,
and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. And whosoever doth not bear
his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.
—Luke 14:26-27
The explanation of the above verse is found in Matthew 10:37-39. Moreover the Lord said to a certain man: Go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me (Mark 10:21).
In case anyone is still wondering if
God could still give us the kind of command He gave to father Abraham, well
here you have it. But as God’s infallibility and omnipotence were the focus for
Abraham, so we also have the Lord’s integrity to put to test.
And Jesus answered and said, Verily I
say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or
father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the
gospel's, But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and
brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions;
and in the world to come eternal life.
— Mark 10:29-30
So the sceptics can now trash their
ludicrous question because, God’s holiness and rationality far exceed the human
race for all eternity. If there be any drop of good judgement, rationality, and
morality remaining in anyone, it was ultimately derived from the Almighty God
whom the unbelievers deny and question.
Barack Obama cited this Abraham’s
story in order to demonstrate that certain of Bible’s plain command, as true
and relevant as they were to the first receivers, are impractical and inapplicable
to a modern “pluralistic” society. Now this position of his may sound
plausible, but the problem is that Mr. Obama was speaking particularly on
subjects the Scripture was plain about such as abortion and homosexuality. His
argument is that religion can be irrational, subjective, “insist[ing] on the
impossible,” and in fact “a dangerous thing”; and therefore the word of God
deserves some dilution with other secular ideology when dealing with
pluralistic society, says he.
Now the error of Mr. Obama is in
conflicting a peculiar instruction to an individual with God’s express command
to all people. Mr. Obama does this in order to remove weight from the gravity
of Scripture. For example, God did not give to Lot (another pious man—2 Pet.
2:7-8) the same instruction He gave to Abraham in this instance. So how does
this example satisfy, let alone justify, Mr. Obama’s argument? He could argue
his cause some other way, but no, he chose to do violence to the Holy
Scripture.
Furthermore on Mr. Obama’s
misrepresentation, God actually asked father Abraham to go, not “to the roof of
his apartment building”, but to faraway place (“into the land of Moriah”), away
from settlement and people, to carry out the instruction (Gen. 22:2-9). So why
does Mr. Obama seek to twist the narrative of Scripture and make a nasty
compression of it? It is so that people would develop limited trust in the
Bible as the word of God, view God as imperfect after all, and therefore would
have the freedom to rebel against His plain commands. It’s the same old tactic
the serpent employed against Eve (Gen. 3:4-5). But God will judge all things.
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