The God Who Stops the Knife

Rethinking Abraham, Isaac, and the Story We Think We Know

Recently I reflected on the story of Abraham and Isaac. I offered a reading that can feel unsettling at first, but I think it opens us to a more generous imagination of who God is. In my view, Abraham does not pass the test. When asked to murder his own son, the faithful response is not obedience without question. The faithful response is to argue with God. To plead for justice. To push back just as Abraham did over Sodom.

In that earlier moment, Abraham challenges God and says, "Will not the judge of all the earth do what is right?" Yet when God calls him to sacrifice Isaac, he stays silent. No resistance. No questions. It is as if he slips back into a small imagination of a vindictive deity. And in that space, God must step in to stop a cycle of violence that humanity continues to perpetuate.

Does This Undo Isaac as a Type of Christ?

One of the common concerns with this interpretation is the idea of typology. If Isaac points us toward Jesus, do we lose that connection if Abraham is not celebrated as faithful here?

Actually, no. I think the typology becomes even stronger.

Isaac is not a type of Christ because Abraham is willing to kill him. Isaac becomes a type of Christ because God intervenes. Isaac is the child for whom God says, "No. This is not who I am. This is not what I want."

The story burns into Israel’s imagination that child sacrifice is a line they will not cross. No matter what other nations demand. No matter what other gods require. Their God is different.

So yes, Isaac prefigures Jesus, but not because God delights in sacrifice. Isaac prefigures Jesus because God interrupts it.

Rethinking the Cross Through This Lens

Here is where we often get tangled. We imagine that God sacrifices Jesus in the same way Abraham was asked to sacrifice Isaac. But this fractures the Trinity. It imagines the Father and the Son with competing wills.

Christian tradition insists that Father, Son, and Spirit share one will, one nature, one love. So the cross is not God doing violence to Jesus. The cross is God in Jesus stepping into the violence we do.

We are the ones who sacrifice Jesus. We scapegoat him. We turn him into a political and religious casualty of our own anxious imagination.

And God absorbs that violence. God does not inflict it.

The Parallel Between Isaac and Jesus

When we read the stories side by side, the connections deepen. If Isaac is the story that ends child sacrifice, Jesus is the story that ends all sacrifice.

The cross is not God demanding blood any more than the Isaac story is God demanding a child. The cross is God revealing our addiction to violence. It is humanity killing an innocent man and calling it justice. It is humanity murdering the Prince of Peace and calling it God’s will.

And what does God do? God raises Jesus from the dead.

Resurrection becomes God’s verdict on our violence. This man is innocent. Your violence is not justice. It is the moment sacrifice is revealed and undone.

“Father, Forgive Them”

Jesus’ words on the cross still ring out. “Father, forgive them. They do not know what they are doing.”

They think they are enacting justice. But they are repeating the old pattern of scapegoating violence, pushing someone to the margins and calling it righteous.

In that moment, God absorbs our violence to put an end to it. That is what God is doing in the story of Isaac and Abraham. Ending sacrifice, step by step, until finally, in Jesus, it is ended for good.

God Passes the Test

So no, Abraham does not pass the test. God does. And when we come to the cross, we do not pass the test. God does.

Isaac does not prefigure divine violence. Isaac prefigures divine mercy. And Jesus does not die because God needs a sacrifice in order to forgive. Jesus dies because we needed to see that sacrifice was never God’s way.

In Isaac, God stops the knife. In Jesus, God stops sacrificial violence forever.

God frees us from the constant need to scapegoat, to sacrifice, to cast out another and call it good. We see Jesus’ innocence, and suddenly our eyes are opened to all the harm we do to each other.

Then in the resurrection, we discover that God has been with us in all of it. Jesus reveals God clearly, perfectly, without distortion. A God who interrupts violence, halts sacrifice, and calls us into a new future.

A God Who Changes the Story

Abraham and Isaac do point us to the cross, but not in the way we often imagine. They point us toward a God who is slowly unveiling a new story. A God who has no appetite for blood. A God who longs to free us from the violence we inherit and the violence we inflict.

And in Jesus, in the cross, and in the resurrection, we see that God clearly for the first time in history. A God who stops the knife. A God who ends sacrifice. A God who shows us a new way to be human.

BTW

You can watch the original sermon here :)