This week, we are beginning the last chapter of Torah Portion Vayers, where God says something shocking to Abraham in order to test him.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.
We’ve spent a lot of weeks learning new things to help us understand Genesis 22. We talked about what a whole burnt offering is, what love means in the Bible, fancy theological words like types and antitypes, and even human sacrifice. And that’s a lot of stuff to have to learn for just one chapter but I want you to remember how much you have already learned because you have been taught a whole lot more about how to read the Bible and how to figure things out than most people ever will. We still have a lot more to learn but we will do that as we go through the chapter. For now, we have a few of the most shocking verses in the whole Bible to deal with and you will begin to see why I spent so long getting you guys ready to understand what’s going on.
But before I get to those verses, there is one more mini-topic to mention. Today we are going to hear about a place called the Land of Moriah, and a mountain there. First of all, people who live in most places wouldn’t call anything in Israel a mountain. They aren’t anything like the Rocky Mountains, the Alps, and certainly not anything like Mount Everest, Mt Fuji, or the Grand Tetons—which I can practically see from my house. That being said, the city of Jerusalem is built on a couple of mountains even if they are smallish ones. The tallest mountain in Jerusalem is called Mt Zion but it was once called Mt Moriah and many believe that it is the place where God sends Abraham and Isaac in this chapter. This would have also been near where Melchizedek (who we met in chapter 14) lived and ruled as king of Salem. But what the Bible says is that Abraham is going to a mountain in the Land of Moriah, and not to Mt Moriah. Are they the same place? We don’t know for sure–but if they are, it makes a lot of sense because that’s where the Temple will be built by King Solomon.
There are just a few verses this week but they are really surprising. So, let’s look at them:
After these things, God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” “Here I am,” Abraham answered. And God said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.”
Wait, God said what? No, it wasn’t your imagination. And I know that you are saying, “God hates that and He wouldn’t ever want anyone to do that to anyone” and you would be right but Abraham doesn’t know that yet. Abraham doesn’t know all of those Bible verses where God was telling His people not to hurt their kids like that, or really anyone like that because they haven’t been written down yet. Abraham lived in a world where this sort of thing didn’t happen all the time, but it did happen sometimes and even once is way too much. It happened back in Mesopotamia where he came from, and it also happened in the Land of Canaan where he is living now. We know that the descendants of Lot will do it for their gods Chemosh and Molech too. Yikes. Not only does Lot make all the wrong decisions but it looks like his kids and grandkids do it too—they aren’t interested in Abraham’s God and no one will be until a woman named Ruth is born far, far in the future. But that’s another story—one of the best stories in the Bible, I think.
But let’s begin at the beginning with the words, “after these things,” because that is where this story begins. You guys know that whenever you see anything like this at the beginning of a chapter, we have to know what happened before this or the story won’t make as much sense. It doesn’t say, “after this” like it’s just talking about one thing but “after these things,” so we know we aren’t just looking at the very last thing that happened. Chapter twenty-one had a ton of important stuff going on, both happy and sad. First of all, baby Isaac was born when his mom was ninety years old and his dad was a hundred. She was very happy! I hope Abraham was happy too, even though back in chapter seventeen, he wasn’t—he wanted his thirteen-year-old son Ishmael to be God’s choice instead. God’s choice would get everything that belonged to Abraham plus he would also be given the Promised Land—or at least his great-grandkids would. All of Ishmael’s life, Abraham had been teaching him and getting him ready for that important job. But when God said that Sarah would finally have a baby, all of Abraham’s plans for his son Ishmael went up in smoke. A year later, Isaac was born and about three years after that, when Ishmael was seventeen, Sarah sent Ishmael away (he and his mom both) and we don’t really ever see either of them again, although Ishmael shows up at Abraham’s funeral in a few more chapters. After Ishmael is sent away, Abraham makes a covenant with Abimelech that neither of them will mess with each other and Abraham digs some wells and paid Abimelech to prove they were his.
So, when the first verse of chapter twenty-two says, “after these things” we know what things they are talking about. At the beginning, Ishmael and his mom Hagar are gone and Abraham doesn’t have to worry about Abimelech attacking him anymore. That means that Isaac has been growing up without needing to worry about anything Ishmael might do or about war with their neighbors. Isaac has lived a life full of peace and safety. Not everyone got to say that back in those days. It was a very dangerous world but Isaac hadn’t seen any of it so far. He knew exactly how his life was going to turn out. He was the only son of a very wealthy and powerful man who was also very old. He would have money, camels, donkeys, slaves, cows, sheep, and goats. Isaac wasn’t ever going to know what it was like to be hungry or poor. Isaac’s life was looking really good for someone who didn’t have an indoor bathroom and air conditioning.
But for whatever reason—and we don’t know exactly why—God decided that He needed to test Isaac’s father Abraham. And that’s kinda strange because so far, Abraham has done everything God has told him to do, no matter how hard or how long it takes. In fact, the only times Abraham gets into trouble is when he has to deal with situations where God isn’t telling him exactly what to do next. When left alone, Abraham gets scared and he lies to people in ways that gets his wife Sarah and other people into a lot of trouble. God always made it work out okay in the end because His plans depended on it, but that doesn’t mean that other people didn’t get hurt. Abraham had trouble trusting God’s promises for the future even though he had no problem doing whatever it was God specifically told him to do. Does that seem strange? Well, it’s a lot easier to follow orders than to trust in something you can’t see. It’s easier to go on a trip just because God told you to do it than it is to believe that an old woman and an old man are going to have a baby! And when you have trouble believing that, you will also have trouble believing that God will keep you alive long enough for it to happen without some meddling and help. Abraham meddled and tried to help out God’s plans by lying to and tricking the people Abraham was scared of. Of course, we know that God didn’t need that help at all but it’s easier to see when it is Abraham than it is when it’s us and our lives and God’s promises to us. And remember, the gods Abraham grew up with were pathetic and couldn’t even make their own dinner without the whole world falling apart around them. His expectations were probably kinda rock bottom in the beginning about what could actually be delivered.
Did God have to test Abraham to see if he would do absolutely anything He asked? It doesn’t seem like it because Abraham always did what God actually told him to do. Of course, God hadn’t ever asked him to do anything like this before. We will be exploring all of this a lot because this chapter has more questions than answers. We are going to have to wrestle with this chapter a lot. Do you know about wrestling? Wrestling is a sport where two people grab onto each other and push and pull and flip each other around trying to get them down onto a mat on the floor. Isaac’s son Jacob is going to wrestle with the Angel of the Lord, for real, for hours and hours!
For some reason, God seems to like it when His people argue with Him and try to get Him to change His mind about stuff. Moses will do it and so will the prophets, and even Jesus will pray and pray and pray for God to change His mind about something. The reason is that we are supposed to love God with all of our hearts, minds, souls, and strength and we can’t do that unless we are using all of those things in our relationship with Him. If we can’t use our brains, then we can’t love Him with our brains. If we can’t use our strength, then we can’t love Him with our strength. He wants all of us and sometimes we just don’t agree with Him or we aren’t happy about what He is doing or not doing and He wants us to know that part of loving Him is being real with Him.
Pretending like we are happy with something when we aren’t just isn’t real. And He isn’t fooled. Part of trust is being willing to talk honestly with another person. Jesus wanted God to find another way to rescue us and so He prayed so hard, three times, that sweat was coming out of him like he was bleeding water. Abraham was so upset about the thought of God maybe killing innocent people that he kept bugging God about it. Moses was so horrified that God might get rid of His people and start all over again with Moses that Moses said there was no way he would cooperate with God if He did that. I sometimes think that God likes to see how good we think He is by what behavior we aren’t wanting to accept from Him. “No way can this be okay with you, God! No way! You are fair and loving and kind and loyal and you can’t be seriously thinking of doing that!” We can do that too. I do it all the time when someone young is sick and hurting. I don’t like that and so I argue with God about it. Not because He did that to them but because the world wasn’t ever supposed to be like this and I want Him to fix it. We get frustrated sometimes and so does God and so talking to Him about it helps a lot sometimes because this wasn’t what He ever wanted either.
Now, the good thing about this first verse is that it says it is only a test and so we know something that Abraham won’t know until the very end of the chapter. But what exactly is a test? A test is a way for one person to find out what another person knows, thinks, or will do when given the chance. For example, there are people on YouTube who make videos testing people. Some of those videos have questions to answer, like, “Do you know who invented such and such?” or “What is the capitol of Oklahoma?” and the person either answers right or wrong. Other people do things like drop a wallet full of money on the sidewalk to see who will walk away with it and who will do the right thing and return it. Sometimes, we think we are super good people until we are given the chance to do something very bad when we think we can get away with it. A lot of times, when we hear about something terrible, we will say, “Oh I wouldn’t ever do that,” but then once we actually get in a situation like that, we do exactly the same thing. Life is full of tests. When Jesus was alone and out in the wilderness, Satan tested Him by trying to get Him to not do things God’s way. Satan told Jesus an easy way to get food when He was hungry, to be famous, and to be powerful. Jesus passed by saying no all three times. When Adam and Eve were tested, they failed. When the children of Israel were tested in the wilderness, they failed. When David was tested, he failed too. Over and over again, we see people failing tests. I suppose that should teach us that we shouldn’t ever assume we are going to pass the tests that God sends our way. I fail those tests a lot.
So, God says, “Abraham!” and Abraham answers, “Here I am!” And I wonder if this was the first time God had talked to Abraham since he had to send Ishmael away. Right now we don’t even know when all this happened—we just know it’s after all the stuff that happened in chapter twenty-one. Ishmael is gone, but that’s all we really know. Then God says the strangest thing ever, and we aren’t quite sure if it is an order or a question because of how it is written in Hebrew. The first words say either, “take your son,” or “please take your son,” or “would you take your son.” And I can tell you that however you read that totally changes the meaning for sure. If it is “take your son” then it is a commandment, and you are supposed to just do it—unless you can convince God to change His mind like Ezekiel did when God told him to eat bread cooked over his own poop. It’s a long story and it makes more sense in context. But the next time you are at the store and see the Ezekiel Bread in the freezer section, just understand that it isn’t really Ezekiel bread because they cooked it in a regular oven and not with cow poop. Thank goodness, eh? And when Peter had that dream with all of the clean and unclean animals on a sheet and God said to get up and eat, Peter said, “No way, I haven’t ever eaten that kind of stuff.” But then Peter found out that God wasn’t talking about animals at all, but that Peter was supposed to go and eat with people who he wasn’t normally allowed to eat with. He only went because God had told him to go. So, maybe this was a command, and God was telling Abraham what He had to do. And maybe the test was to see whether Abraham would do it or argue because we see people doing both in the Bible and it’s okay.
But what if God said, “please take your son?” Ooh, that’s tricky. Even if He just said “please,” does Abraham think he can actually say no? Gods in Abraham’s world don’t get told no very often and when they did, bad things happened. And it could also be, “would you take your son” as in, “would you do that for me?” Then God says something very interesting about Isaac that isn’t entirely true—He calls Isaac, “your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love,” but we all know that Isaac isn’t Abraham’s only son, right? And he isn’t even the only son whom Abraham loves, so what gives? Well, that’s a really good question and we have to remember that although God sent Ishmael away, He loves and cares for Ishmael and made many promises about him for his future. For some reason (and we don’t know exactly why), God agreed with Sarah that Ishmael and Isaac couldn’t both be together and we know they couldn’t both inherit from Abraham because God wanted the miracle child to get all of God’s promises to Abraham about the Land of Canaan. God never forgot Ishmael and made him into a great nation of people who roamed the desert. We will see them again, in fact.
But how can God call Isaac Abraham’s only son? Well, as far as the promises that God made Abraham back at the beginning of chapter twelve, when He told Abraham to leave his family and go to a strange new place, Isaac is the only son who gets counted. Abraham and Sarah made a terrible mistake but that doesn’t mean that God has to change His plans so that Abraham will like them better. God was always thinking about making a miracle baby, named Isaac, and making a new people out of him. Abraham and Sarah didn’t get to change that, just like we don’t get to change God’s plans either. So, God could just as well be saying, “your son, the only son I ever gave you, who you will be loyal to and give everything you have to.” Do you remember our lesson on love a few weeks ago? Love isn’t mushy gushy feelings all the time and in the Bible it most often means loyalty. Love is a covenant word meaning that we always do whatever is right and good in a relationship. We help one another and keep our promises. Abraham had wanted Ishmael to get the promises God gave him because Abraham was loyal to his son and loved him more than a son who wasn’t even born yet. But God needs to remind Abraham that his covenant loyalty belongs to Isaac, no matter how much he will always love Ishmael and want the best for him. Or maybe God is talking about Abraham understanding that he does need to be loyal to Isaac—maybe Abraham is more loyal to Isaac now than he was to Ishmael. We aren’t ever really told what happened. Everything God has said up to this point is showing Abraham that Isaac is the one and only promised child. Isaac is the only plan, just like Jesus is the only plan. Abraham has already gotten absolutely everything that God had promised would happen during his life and all the rest of it is for his kids and grandkids so that Jesus can happen.
But what happened next must have shocked Abraham even more than it has shocked us: “go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.” Yikes, it’s a good thing we know now that God won’t ever ask us to do anything like that but in Abraham’s world, that happened sometimes. I mean, gods didn’t ask their followers to do this but people believed it would make their gods happy and so sometimes they did it but they didn’t know that their gods weren’t real and Abraham didn’t know that either. For all he knew, the gods he grew up with were real but still in Babylonia, thousands of miles away, and he just wasn’t worshiping them anymore. If Abraham had a Bible, he would know about all of the things God said about not wanting people to sacrifice people but he didn’t. He would know how much God hates every kind of murder and how killing a person just to try and make any god happy would be even worse than murder. People are made as the images of God and killing one like that is an insult to Him. But for all Abraham knew, all those other people who had killed their children for their own gods had been told to and now the God who has been with him and who has given him so much for all this time is asking him to do it too. It’s easy to forget that everything that is normal to us now wasn’t normal to him. He just had no idea. That’s why it was a test. If we heard a voice telling us to do that, we would need to go to the hospital because that kind of a test wouldn’t make any kind of sense to us. We understand that God would hate that and we would just say, “Um…no. I don’t think this is really God. This must be Satan trying to trick me.”
Now, some people will tell you that God killed Jesus, His own Son, but that isn’t true at all. God and Jesus worked together to trick and trap Satan and that was the only way to do it. People killed Jesus, not God. God let it happen because that was their rescue plan right from the start. People had to be the ones to kill Jesus so that when He came back from the dead we would know that we don’t have to be afraid of what people can do to us because God is bigger and better and will make us come alive again too. No good dads kill their kids in the Bible, and the dads who did kill their kids had really messed up ideas about God. God is a good father. He is the best father ever.
We have to wonder what Abraham was thinking about God but I have a spoiler for you—we never find out.
I love you. I am praying for you. Noah didn’t argue with God about the flood. Abraham argued with God about destroying Sodom. What will Abraham do now that God has asked him to offer up Isaac like an animal on an altar? What do you think you would do if you were him, living back then?