Q. God asked Abraham to take his son Isaac and sacrifice him as an offering to God. My understanding has always been that he was testing Abraham’s faithfulness. But wouldn’t an all-knowing God have known the results of the test beforehand, making the test pointless? Or was this not really a test but something else? Perhaps an object lesson for Abraham? But what lesson?
The Bible does begin the story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac by saying that “God tested Abraham.” However, I don’t think we should understand the word “test” to mean that God did this in order to find out something that he didn’t already know.
That can be one sense of the word in Hebrew. That is the meaning, for example, when Eliphaz asks Job, “If someone tries to speak with you, will you be upset?” It is also the meaning when Moses asks in Deuteronomy, “Has any god ever tried to take one nation out of another to be his own?” In both of these cases, someone would be trying something without knowing in advance how it would work out.
However, the word can also have a different sense: to try with the expectation of success. Think of how a climber pulls down hard on a rope to make sure that it is secure before using it to ascend a rock face. That is testing with the expectation of success. The word has this sense in the Bible when, for example, Daniel says to the guard, “Please test your servants for ten days: Give us nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then compare our appearance with that of the young men who eat the royal food, and treat your servants in accordance with what you see.” Daniel expected success: He expected that the guard would see that he and his friends looked healthier than the others, and the guard also expected that this would reasonably be the outcome, or he wouldn’t have allowed the test.
I believe that this is also the sense in Genesis when God “tests” Abraham by telling him to sacrifice Isaac. God expected success. He had every reason to believe that Abraham would obey. So why, then, did he test him, if he knew in advance how things would turn out? I think there were at least two good reasons.
Jonathan Edwards wrote, “If something is excellent, it is excellent for it to be known.” So, for one thing, God was causing Abraham’s excellent trust in him and faithfulness to him to be known by demonstration. That continues to provide an example for us today. The book of Hebrews cites Abraham as one of the outstanding examples of faith, saying, “When Abraham was tested, he had faith and was willing to sacrifice Isaac.” I have heard many sermons referencing this story and asking what we ourselves might need to “lay on the altar” in order to be faithful to God, in order to put obedience to God before anything else.
But there was also a second good reason. The story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac is actually a polemic against human sacrifice. Modern readers are shocked when God tells Abraham to kill his son as a sacrifice. But the ancient audience would not have been shocked. People in those cultures did practice human sacrifice, particularly when they wanted a great favor from a god. If the followers of Yahweh did not do the same, the followers of other gods would conclude that Yahweh was not capable of doing great things and did not deserve expressions of extreme devotion. So when God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, this may have given Abraham the impression that God was more concerned about his own reputation than he was about the promises he had made to Abraham, which were in the process of being fulfilled. But Abraham gave God the benefit of the doubt. However things might have appeared, Abraham knew that he could trust God to have good reasons and good motives for what he was asking.
And in the end, it turned out that God wanted to make it clear that those who worshiped him were not to practice human sacrifice. He provided a ram in place of Isaac. And that ram had already been “caught in a thicket” when Abraham arrived at Mount Moriah. In other words, even before Abraham reached the place where he was prepared to offer Isaac, God had already made provision for him not to offer Isaac. So in its original context, this passage would have been, as I said, a strong polemic against the human sacrifice that other cultures and religions practiced. This practice was later explicitly forbidden in the law of Moses. We today live in the aftermath of this divine disallowance of a reprehensible human practice, to such an extent that sermons can metaphorically ask us what “Isaac” we need to “lay on the altar” without us being shocked by the literal reality behind the metaphor.
So, to summarize, I believe that when God “tested” Abraham, God was not doing that to find out something he didn’t already know. Rather, God was allowing Abraham’s exemplary trust and faithfulness to be demonstrated, and God was also using the occasion to make clear that those who worshiped him were not to offer human sacrifices.
Good Question 