There is something offensive to us, something well-nigh incomprehensible about this story of Abraham’s plan to offer his own son as a sacrifice to God. It outrages our finest sensibilities. How did such a story ever get into the Holy Bible? Soren Kierkegaard says of this narrative: “Abraham I can not understand. In a certain sense there is nothing I can learn from him but astonishment.”

But let us not be too harsh with Abraham. Perhaps he resembles us more than we realize or are willing to admit. Certainly there is this point of similarity: he, as we, reflect some of the ideas and practices of pagan neighbors. Human sacrifice was a common occurrence in that far off day. It was an almost universal religious practice. In the time of Elisha, about 800 B.C., in a crisis of battles for his capital, the King of Moab took his eldest son and offered him for a burnt offering upon the wall. (II Kings 3:27)

In the time of the Judges, Israel’s leader, Jepthah, promised the Lord that if victory be granted his army, then whatever came out of his house to welcome him on his victorious return would be sacrificed in gratitude to God. And when from the doorway of his happy home there came running in glad welcome his dear, beautiful daughter, his only child, that poor broken-hearted man felt under divine compulsion to offer her up and he did in bloody sacrifice.

The Greek story of Iphigenia enshrines the same practice of human sacrifice to placate deity in the religion of ancient Greece. During the Trojan War, so Homer sang, the Greek fleet was unable to set sail from Aulis because of an adverse wind, caused, so the Greeks believed, by the Goddess Artemis whom King Agamemnon had offended. The offense could be expiated only by Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his lovely daughter, Iphigenia.

Now, Abraham, like all humanity before and since, was a product of his times. He was not untouched by the thinking and practices of his pagan neighbors. Surely there are about us, even in this enlightened age, some stout convictions, some social or anti-social customs, some private practices drawn from our society and our environment which, if observed from the point of view of God’s perfect Kingdom, may seem just as inhumane and violent as Abraham’s plan to offer his only son Isaac as a bloody sacrifice to God.

Then, there is also this, horrible, offensive as it may be to us, there is a deep truth in the Abraham Isaac story we must get hold of and never let go: sacrifice has an enduring place in man’s religious life. The impulse to sacrifice to God rises from the deepest depths of man’s soul. Wherever men and women have been in dead earnest about their religious observances, sacrifice has held the focal center of their ritual of worship.

In old Israel the national religious life was organized first about the Tabernacle and later about the Temple at Jerusalem and at the heart of that elaborate system of worship, both in tabernacle and temple, was the bloody sacrifice of sheep, goats and cattle to their God.

The Aztec Indians of North and Central America achieved a comparatively high degree of civilized and cultural life and at the center of and dominating individual and common life was the worship of their gods through offering human sacrifices.

This concept of sacrifice in religion is so deeply imbedded in the human mind, penetrating even, it seems, to the very involuntary sub-conscious, that you find it wherever the record of human life remains — in India, China, the Congo, all the way from burning babies, to Molloch in Canaan 3,000 years ago, to mutilating one’s own flesh along the Ganges today. This concept of sacrifice in religion is engrained so deep that we can’t completely get rid of it.

But the heart of the whole matter we reach in the 12^th chapter of St. Paul’s Roman letter. There he discusses with reason and spiritual insight, the right and eternally proper place of sacrifice in the worship of Almighty God. There he says three things we would do well to heed, lest our sacrificial service become perverted and unpleasing to the Eternal. Hear the great Apostle through to the end: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.”

First, let us note well, that God’s inspired servant tells us it is our own selves, our bodies, and not someone else, that God wants us to present to Him. How characteristically human, when the notion rises in one’s mind that sacrifice is fitting, even necessary, that it is someone else’s life which ought to be sacrificed, and not our own.

The old Aztecs waged war for the primary purpose of taking prisoners alive in battle in order that they might offer the lives of their enemies on the sacrificial altars of their temples. The Aztec priests would open the victim’s abdomen, reach out the beating heart, and burn it in a stone furnace to appease their deities.

But St. Paul says it is not another’s heart that God wants offered to Him, but each person’s own heart. “If with all your heart, ye truly seek me, ye shall ever surely find me, thus saith your God.” What God wanted of Abraham was not his son’s life, but his, Abraham’s. This Abraham ultimately discovered.

“Elemental,” you say, “Elemental. We know all that. Don’t waste our time telling us it is our lives, our hearts that God wants offered in sacrifice to Him and not another’s. That lesson from Abraham, the Aztecs and St. Paul is old hat.”

Oh, yeah! Well, what of our feverish preparations right now to offer on the altar of war not only our fine young sons, the flower of our manhood, as we have done in innumerable previous wars, but now, for the first time, in a completely total war, we are preparing to offer our tender children and helpless babies, rather than give ourselves with sufficient abandon to God’s way of love and peace and brotherhood?

Yes, and what about our hard headed resistance to God’s word of truth, and His revealed will for our lives, in offering our youth up to spiritual death in perverting their minds and souls with our old superstition of racial superiority and an iniquitous social order full of injustices and indignities? How is it that the song in South Pacific put it — “You’ve got to be taught to hate” as men hate in our kind of world?

Tragic things always take place when we pervert the divine order of sacrifice and offer up instead of ourselves, another. What was the result in Isaac’s life of this traumatic experience? Why, the scriptures picture Isaac as a weak, ineffectual, colorless personality, a weak link in the generations between those strong, dramatic characters on either side of him: Abraham, Isaac’s father, and Jacob and Esau, Isaac’s twin sons.

Is there not here abundant evidence to prove what a mistake it is for parents to sacrifice their children, even to their most sacred convictions or most selfish desires? Have you never heard of the son who finally gave into his father’s dictates in choice of a life work,  never found happiness in it, and gave it up when the old man died? Have you ever seen the daughter who never married just in order to take care of mama and papa because the old folks were so crotchety and irascible that she couldn’t expect her beloved to put up with them?

Abraham has a right, yea, even a bounden duty, to sacrifice himself, his time, his possessions in response to God’s word in his own soul, but had he the right to sacrifice the life of his son without the boy’s knowledge or consent? The scriptures record the dreadful blasting to Isaac’s personality — how it cut the cord of initiative, how it undermined his basic confidence in his father and in his father’s God when his own sacred personality was so violated. The same tragedy is written large across the pages of human life every day, even now, when we will not accept what St. Paul tells us in the first law of sacrifice — that it is our bodies, our hearts and our lives and not others that God wants us to offer him.

Then there is this second significant thing St. Paul says about sacrifice — it is a living sacrifice God wants — not a dead one. God wants not the spilling of your blood or another’s blood in some disemboweling hari-kari on a stony altar. He wants you to live for Him. He wants you to lay that precious life He has created and redeemed through Christ down in redemptive love for God and others, not in waste, but in useful, productive service. The Creator who is so busy bringing life into the world wants it all directed spiritually to His holy purposes. But that is our work, not His. He will not over-ride our wills nor use us as cattle in the abattoir.

The prophet Micah’s great text puts in striking contrast the acceptable living sacrifice and the unacceptable dying sacrifice: “How shall I come before the Lord? Will He be pleased with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Shall I give my first born child in bloody human sacrifice — the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? Oh, no! Man, He has showed you what is good in His sight. What does the Lord require of you, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.” “Present your body a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God.”

Finally, St. Paul says the standard for the acceptable sacrifice has been clearly set by God himself. “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice.” The mercies of God to us proclaim the acceptable sacrificial system. What are the mercies of God? The life, the death, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.”

Once, in the household of Martin Luther, for family devotions, this story of Abraham and Isaac was read. Wide-eyed the Luther children listened as their father recounted the dreadful tale. “Abraham bound his son and laid him upon the wood. The father raised his knife. The boy bared his throat.” And Luther’s wife, Katherine Von Rora, indignantly interrupted the story, hotly saying, “I do not believe it. God would not have treated his son that way.” “But Katie,” answered Luther, “he did.” (Here I Stand — Roland Bainton, p. 369 — Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1950, Nashville, Tennessee)

Yes, God did. But the son laid his life down in obedience to the Father, yet there was no compelling of the Son beyond his own will. “Jesus who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.”

So we have the pattern to a rational religion in the life and death and resurrection of the Son of God. Let us look to Him. We need never be in the dark about the great sacrificial system of the universe.

And it is at this point of sacrifice in our most sacred and prized relationships that Abraham affords us such a lustrous example. The story clearly reveals Abraham’s willingness to give up, sacrifice, dedicate anything to God, if God but ask for it. Every one of us holds something dearer to our hearts than life itself. It may be a beautiful daughter, a promising son, a cherished profession, the very heart of life. And it is that that God wants, yea, even demands. But we offer it to the Eternal not by slaying it, but by being willing to stand aside and let down the bars of our will and let God have His way with that heart of our heart.

Oh, the mothers and fathers who are withholding from God their choice sons and daughters from the gospel ministry, from the world mission fields, from numerous needed careers the world would never honor nor reward. How many times have we seen the households of Presbyterian families shaken with anxious confusion when a son or a daughter announces he or she has under consideration some life vocation which would turn that young person away from the profitable opportunity of the family business.

An administrative officer in one of our Presbyterian Theological Seminaries was talking to a Presbyterian meeting of women church leaders about the shortage of ministers and missionaries now crippling our church — especially the shortage of the most intelligent and most talented. “Why is it,” he asked, “that our most talented young men and women are not offering themselves for the kingdom of God. I’ll tell you why,” he said. “It is because of you            . You mothers have not wanted them to.”

Oh, there are more subtle ways of withholding from God our own flesh and blood than bluntly saying: “No, you can’t go into the ministry or the mission service.” When we hold up before the forming imaginations of our children and grandchildren, day by day in our homes in rich colors of allurement, the places of wealth and prestige and power and pleasure of this brief passing world instead of surrounding with a halo of glory the life of a David Livingstone, or an Albert Schweitzer, we are assuredly offering or refusing our God.

“It is only when human life is lifted up and consecrated to the love of God that life can be on the road to its redemption. That is the mighty truth that shines in this story of Abraham.” (Interpreters Bible)

Sacrifice! What do we know of it? How are we practicing it? Without sacrifice there can be no religious life. Yet how easily we pervert it. “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies as living sacrifices holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.”