Category: Justice/Fairness of God

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.

 Q. In one of your articles, you explain why Saul was punished when he offered sacrifices himself after Samuel told him to wait seven days.

But Saul, did wait for seven days. Samuel did not do what Samuel was supposed to do by arriving on the seventh day. Saul was, therefore, left wondering where in the world Samuel was and why he was not keeping his end of the deal.

Then Saul’s army scattered. It was a dire situation.

Then Samuel finally shows up and all the punishment goes on Saul.

I am having a hard time seeing how all this is just and right. However, I know that God is perfectly just, so there’s obviously something I’m not understanding. Can you help me understand this situation better?

Thank you for your question. Here is how I understand what happened in the passage you are asking about.

Samuel told Saul to “wait seven days” until he was able to come to the Israelite military camp at Gilgal and offer sacrifices in order to seek God’s favor in the fight against the Philistines. On the seventh day, the day by which Samuel said he would arrive, Saul decided that Samuel actually was not coming and so he offered the sacrifices himself. In the post you mention, I explain how this violated God’s design to separate the kingship from the priesthood in Israel and how it made Saul more of a Canaanite-style priest-king.

But this bad outcome was completely avoidable. Samuel actually did arrive on that seventh day. When the Bible says that Saul “waited seven days,” this does not mean that he waited seven whole days, Samuel did not come, and on the eighth day Saul offered the sacrifices. Rather, Samuel came on the seventh day itself. In fact, he arrived just as Saul was finishing offering the sacrifices. In other words, if Saul had waited only a little while longer, Samuel could have offered the sacrifices and, as he told Saul, “the Lord would have established your kingdom over Israel permanently.”

So why didn’t Saul wait? Impatience. And a lack of faith in God. But we ourselves are in no position to judge Saul for these things, since we too often exhibit them ourselves. However, we can at least seek to learn from Saul’s unfortunate example. Many times, if we would just wait a little longer and trust God just a little bit more, we would see God bring help and deliverance in situations in which we feel just as desperate as Saul did.

Q. Why didn’t Isaac confront Jacob about stealing the blessing meant for his brother Esau?

Your question is about the account in the book of Genesis of how Isaac’s younger son Jacob tricked his father into giving him, rather than his brother Esau, the blessing that Esau should have received as the older brother. Readers in many contemporary cultures will have questions about this account because in it, the authority figure (Isaac, the father) does not act in the way we would hope and expect authority figures to act.

For one thing, as you suggest, from the perspective of many contemporary cultures, Isaac should have confronted his son about his deception and theft and corrected him. Beyond that, many contemporary readers will wonder in the first place why, when Isaac realized what had happened (“Your brother came deceitfully and took your blessing.,” he told Esau), he did not retract the blessing that Jacob had obtained fraudulently. Was it really the norm in this culture for people to be bound by their word, even if they had been led to give it under false circumstances?

Apparently so. There is a comparable account in the book of Judges of how the Gibeonites, a tribe living in the land of Canaan, deceived the Israelites into swearing an oath of peace with them by pretending to be a group that lived far from Canaan. The Israelites were supposed to destroy all of the Canaanite tribes, but when they finally learned who the Gibeonites really were, they said, “We have given them our oath by the Lord, the God of Israel, and we cannot touch them now.”

As I said, this may seem strange to many contemporary readers. We do not consider people to be bound by their word if they have made a statement under compromised circumstances. In the United States, for example, a confession can be dismissed as evidence if it can be shown that it was made under duress. What readers of the Bible may wonder most is how God could consider people to be bound by their word under such circumstances. Isn’t God fair? Why would God hold people to statements they would not have made if they had not been deceived?

I think the answer, as we see often in the Bible, is that God chooses to work within the conventions of human cultures to pursue his redemptive purposes. The Bible clearly disallows many cultural practices that are destructive of human flourishing. But in general, as I have said in other posts on this blog, God works out his plan through the free choices, good and bad, of human moral agents, accommodating human cultures in the process. Rather than completely setting aside the cultures humans have built, which are often for the most part positive creative achievements, God looks at a situation and says, “I can work with that.”

But this brings up an important interpretive principle: As one of my seminary professors used to say, “Narrative is not necessarily normative.” Just because Isaac, based on his own cultural norms, considered himself bound by a blessing he had given under false circumstances, that does not mean that we today should enforce the same norm. Rather, I think that based on the counsel of the Bible overall, we should only hold people to their word if it was given fully informed and with free consent.

So to answer your question, I would say that Isaac did not confront Jacob about stealing Esau’s blessing because Isaac considered it a “done deal” according to his cultural norms and there was nothing he could do about it. But we do not need to take that as a model for ourselves today. I think we should instead encourage people who have been led to give their word under false circumstances to take back what they have said and not consider themselves bound by it. And yes, they should confront the person who deceived them and impose any consequences that would be appropriate as a penalty and correction.

Q. I am certain Jesus loves me, and I love Him. After all, I am His creation and He made the ultimate sacrifice for me. That said, have we taken that concept too far as Western Christians? Have we assumed too much when it comes to how much Jesus loves each of us “personally”? Have we become too arrogant or prideful in our assumption?

Frequently an athlete will say after a win,”I thank Jesus for this win,” which is great, but what about the losing competitor? Are we assuming that Jesus does not love them as much?

Some time ago I heard a lady tell the story of how she missed an airplane flight and she was glad the Lord had caused her to do so because the plane went down and all the passengers were killed. It appeared to me that she made the assumption that Jesus loved her more than the other 200-plus folks who made the connection.

Is this taking our understanding of Jesus’s love for each of us personally too far? In other words, have we in this day and age misinterpreted God’s love for us individually and become arrogant, like James and John who requested that they alone were loved so much that they should be seated on the throne next to Jesus?

I certainly agree with you that when good things happen to us or bad things don’t happen to us, we tend to feel gratitude toward God and a sense that God loves us. I also agree with you that there are the troubling implications that perhaps God does not love people as much for whom good things do not happen or bad things do happen.

So there is another way to look at it. We could say that the gratitude we feel towards God is actually a recognition of his character as a loving, gracious, generous, and merciful God, and that any success or mercy we might experience triggers this recognition in us. But the success is actually the result of the hard work and perseverance of someone to whom God has given talents and ambition (for which they should genuinely be grateful to God), while failure or tragedy are misfortunes that happen to people in a world that God has created with a moral framework but in which God does not determine every specific event. If a person is spared a misfortune, direct divine intervention may not have been involved, but that person should nevertheless take the experience to heart and resolve before God, with gratitude, to make the best use of the time they will still have in this life.

This would avoid the unfortunate implications of the first view. However, perhaps it removes God too much from the picture. So I would actually recommend a third view. It is generally the same as the second view, except it allows for the possibility of direct divine intervention in particular cases, for God’s sovereign purposes. In those cases, the recipient of the blessing or mercy could well recognize it as coming directly from God, but others looking on would not necessarily have the benefit of that insight. So in such cases I would recommend being just as careful as we would be under the second view. We would not say in public, “I’m convinced that God spared my life for a purpose,” if there were others who were not spared.

I think the principle that applies is, “What you believe about these things, keep between yourself and God.” So, for example, if you are a young athlete who wins an important tennis match, you could thank God for the gifts of health and strength. But also be sure to congratulate your opponent on his or her excellent play and say what a pleasure and privilege it was to compete with him or her. And do not attribute your victory to direct divine intervention!

Q. Why did God allow King Saul’s rule to continue so long after He withdrew from Saul? Also, why would King Saul’s army willingly hunt to kill an innocent man?

We don’t know precisely how long Saul ruled after God’s Spirit withdrew from him, but it does seem to have been a period of some years. Perhaps the simple answer to the question of why God allowed Saul to continue to reign is that time was required to prepare David to be a better kind of king than Saul had been. During his years serving Saul, first as a court musician and then as an army commander, and during the years when he was  fleeing from Saul, David had the opportunity to gain much experience and learn many lessons that enabled him to be a better king. Unfortunately there seem to have been some lessons that David failed to learn or forgot, but overall he made Israel much more the kind of place God wanted it to be than Saul did.

This may be best illustrated by the answer to your second question. When Saul, out of jealousy, first told his son Jonathan (the crown prince) and his commanders to kill David, Jonathan defended David and so Saul agreed not to kill him. But Saul soon became jealous and murderous again. It seems that, without telling Jonathan, he wanted his commanders to kill David, but they did not cooperate. However, a foreigner named Doeg the Edomite told Saul that the priests at the city of Nob had helped David, and so Saul went there and had Doeg kill all the priests and their entire families.

This seems to have been the beginning of a reign of terror. The implication was that Saul would also kill the entire family of anyone else who helped David. (This might explain why Nabal, for example, would do nothing for David, although his bad character alone may be sufficient to explain that.) We learn later in the Bible that Saul had also killed many people from a tribe that the Israelites had sworn to leave peacefully alone. Saul did that in order to take their land.

So we can imagine that Saul’s soldiers and commanders feared for their own lives and for the safety of their families and that is why they pursued David, even though they knew that he was innocent. When a person in power is bent on doing wrong, unfortunately that leads many people who are under that person’s power to do wrong as well.

While David was guilty of his own sins against Uriah and Bathsheba through the abuse of his kingly power, he certainly did not have a reign of terror as Saul did. For the most part the Israelites under his reign were free from oppression and enjoyed a time of peace and prosperity during which they worshiped the true God. That is why the Bible uses David as the standard by which it measures all subsequent kings. The book of Kings, recorded by the prophets in Israel, puts it this way: “David had done what was right in the eyes of the Lord and had not failed to keep any of the Lord’s commands all the days of his life—except in the case of Uriah the Hittite.” And as I said before, perhaps it was to give David time to develop into this kind of king that God allowed Saul to stay on the throne for several more years.

Q. Is their a description of a meeting, presumably in heaven, in which King Saul is discussed? God’s present but is letting subordinates talk and make suggestions. None of the suggestions are acceptable to God until one participant declares that he would give Saul a depressing spirit. God likes this idea and the matter is settled.

I believe you are thinking of two Scripture passages at once. There is a passage in 1 Kings much like the one you describe, except that the discussion is about King Ahab. The prophet Micaiah tells Ahab:

“I saw the Lord sitting on his throne with all the multitudes of heaven standing around him on his right and on his left. And the Lord said, ‘Who will entice Ahab into attacking Ramoth Gilead and going to his death there?’

“One suggested this, and another that. Finally, a spirit came forward, stood before the Lord and said, ‘I will entice him.’

“‘By what means?’ the Lord asked.

“‘I will go out and be a deceiving spirit in the mouths of all his prophets,’ he said.

“‘You will succeed in enticing him,’ said the Lord. ‘Go and do it.’

“So now the Lord has put a deceiving spirit in the mouths of all these prophets of yours. The Lord has decreed disaster for you.”

There is another Scripture passage, in 1 Samuel, about the Lord sending a depressing spirit to Saul, but it says simply:

“Now the Spirit of the Lord had left Saul, and the Lord sent a tormenting spirit that filled him with depression and fear.”

So I hope that answers your question about whether there was a meeting in heaven about what to do about Saul, who had disobeyed God. The meeting was actually about Ahab, who had also disobeyed God and who was, in fact, one of the most wicked kings Israel ever had.

Each passage raises further questions, however. How could God make use of lying or deception? And how could God send someone depression? I discuss these questions in these other posts, which I invite you to read:

Does God let us use deception for a good cause? (Part 3)

Did God really send an evil spirit to torment Saul?

Q. Should Christians pray the imprecatory psalms?

Let me say first that I think “praying the psalms” (that is, making the psalms in the Bible our own prayers) is a good practice. However, people who do this are often uncomfortable praying the so-called imprecatory psalms, in which the psalmists ask God to destroy their enemies.

I devote an entire lesson to the imprecatory psalms in my study guide to the Psalms. It is Lesson 10, on pages 59–63. You can read the study guide online or down load it at this link. I hope the lesson will give you a perspective on the imprecatory psalms that will help you decide whether to include them in your devotional practice of “praying the psalms.”

Q. Why did God hate Esau even before he was born?

In response to your question, please see this post:

When did Esau “break off the yoke” of Jacob?

In that post I note specifically that while in Romans “Paul quotes the statement from Malachi, ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated,’ we need to appreciate that the Hebrew language uses the term ‘hated’ in contexts like this to refer to a son or wife who is not favored, by contrast with one who is favored. The meaning is, ‘I favored Jacob, but I did not favor Esau.'” Malachi’s statement, and Paul’s quotation of it, reflect this usage. So God did not actually “hate” Esau. Rather, he chose Jacob instead to continue the covenant line.