Scary picture, isn't it? Think about this incident from Isaac's perspective. "What on earth is dad doing? He's bound me, he's raising the knife! He's going to kill me?!"
I'm sure social services would have taken Isaac away from Abraham. Here is an abusive, mentally ill father, doing what God told him to do; sacrifice his son.
So why did God ask Abraham to do such a thing? Passages such as Psalm 44:21, Luke 16:15, Acts 15:8, Romans 8:27, 1 John 3:20 tell us that God knows our hearts. If God knows our hearts, why does he test Abraham? Wouldn't he already know what he appears to discover about Abraham? "I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me" (Genesis 22:12). What is the point of the test? Who is the test for?
I know that Hebrews 11:17-19 gives us some insight into this passage, but if we read it canonically (in the order in which it is written, without reading the New Testament back into the passage just yet), what image appears for us? There is no mention in this text that Abraham believed God would raise his son from the dead. It is clearly a test of Abraham and his willingness to obey God. Quite honestly, a canonical reading of Genesis to this point reveals a rather different picture of God than the classic philosophical-theological view. Perhaps more on this in another post.
How do we square this passage with the classic philosophical-theological understanding of who God is? Merciful, loving, omniscient, unchanging? Perhaps this is where Greg Boyd and open theism can help us:
If the classical understanding of foreknowledge is true, God’s statement “now I know” seems disingenuous. The meaning of God’s explanation for this knowledge—+dqo/since you have...”—is also obscured. Indeed, if the future is exhaustively settled there would be no point in his test of Abraham, because God would never have to find out anything.
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