Abraham's Utmost for His Highest

One Texas night in May 2003, a Pentecostal woman in her late thirties dropped rocks onto the skulls of her sons – 8, 6, 14 months. When a forensic psychiatrist spoke with her once she'd been medicated, it turned out that, for days beforehand, she'd been hearing and feeling urges she took as the voice of God, demanding she kill her children as a test of her faith and a prophetic sign that the end of all things was nigh.¹ Decades earlier, at a compound called Jonestown in Guyana, over nine hundred members of a cult group committed “revolutionary suicide” by drinking poisoned Flavor-Aid, with parents willingly administering the deadly brew to their own children first to spare them from falling into captivity to the brainwashing forces of darkness outside.²

Genesis 22 is “a powerful and disturbing story.”³ Over fifteen centuries ago, St. Augustine said that “every time the story is read, it affects the minds of the listeners as though it were happening before their eyes.”⁴ Scholars today call it “one of the most indigestible scenes in scripture,”⁵ “one of the most problematic passages in the Bible,”⁶ which seems like it “conflicts with the moral and biblical prohibition against murder.”⁷ During the so-called 'Enlightenment,' the German philosopher Immanuel Kant charged that this “myth of the sacrifice” entails an impossible divine summons “to do something contrary to the moral law” that binds universally, and since the universal always outweighs the particular, Abraham should never have believed the voice.⁸ Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, forty-five years later, retorted that faith suspends ethics and makes “the single individual higher than the universal,” a paradox whose power “makes murder into a holy and God-pleasing act.”⁹

The question matters, because Abraham is “the father of us all” in whose footsteps believers are to walk (Romans 4:12-16), and this isn't just any obscure scene from his life, it's “the climax of Abraham's religious odyssey,”¹⁰ it's “the decisive moment in Abraham's relationship to God.”¹¹ In our own century, atheist critics make hay of the thought that Abraham was “praised to the clouds for showing his sturdy willingness to murder an innocent in expiation of his own crimes.”¹² They sit in judgment on “this disgraceful story,” they call it, as “an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relationships, and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defense: 'I was only obeying orders.'”¹³ In the end, they see no difference between Abraham and the parents at Jonestown or the woman in Texas, proving (in their eyes) that biblical faith is a mentally unhealthy and dangerous thing.¹⁴ But even muting the scoffers, I've sat with believers who've been deeply troubled by Genesis 22. Should we all be singing with Leonard Cohen, “If you are the dealer, I'm out of the game.... I didn't know I had permission to murder and to maim.... You want it darker; we kill the flame”?¹⁵ Well, from the philosophers to the skeptics, there's been a lot of “reading without empathy and without context,” for which the cure is reading closely, attentively, inquisitively, empathetically, and humbly before God.¹⁶

This chapter opens up with the phrase “it came about after these things” (Genesis 22:1) – well, what things? There are three main chapters Genesis 22 subtly points us back to. First was when we met Abram in chapter 12, at the LORD's initial call on Abram's life. That was the first time God spoke to Abraham, and this chapter gives us the last, making bookends around that meaty stage of Abraham's life; and they emphasize it with similar summons for Abraham to do something. Second was chapter 20, where Abraham put his own wife and the possibility of her conceiving his son at risk, because, he said, after the godlessness of Sodom, he doubted whether there could be any 'fear of God' in Gerar either. And third is last chapter, when Abraham, assured that “through Isaac shall your seed be called” (Genesis 21:12), was required to surrender his teenage son Ishmael, 'the boy,' to an ordeal in the desert. The description of his and Hagar's plight uses many words and phrases that crop back up here, in this sequel. Now this chapter opens an unknown number of years later, but it's at least ten; where Isaac was then a child, now he can carry loads of wood and carry on meaningful conversation, and serious guesses of his age have ranged from his late teens to his late thirties.¹⁷

Right off the bat, the events of this chapter are summed up as “the God tested Abraham” (Genesis 22:1). Two vital things: first, the author tells us up from that we have here “a test of Abraham's relationship with God.”¹⁸ But it's weird we're told that, because until now the author has usually held back key pieces of information and then dropped in a twist at the end, forcing us to reinterpret everybody's motives. But here, the Bible abandons that tactic, refusing to let us read this chapter without a big neon disclaimer: THIS IS A TEST.¹⁹ The other vital thing is that God starts off here, not as “the LORD,” not even as “God,” but as “the God.” So far in the Bible, this expression crops up before the Flood in stories meant to resemble pagan mythology (Genesis 5:24; 6:4), once when Abraham appeals to “the God” over his unchosen son Ishmael (Genesis 17:18), and more in chapter 20 where the pagan king Abimelech gets revelation from “the God” (Genesis 20:6, 17). This way of starting should make us suspicious that God's going to be playing a more primitive-sounding role, in a pagan accent.²⁰

So “the God... said to him, 'Abraham!' And he said, 'Here I am!'” (Genesis 22:1). Abraham's response, as the God calls him in the night, is just one Hebrew word, literally “Behold me!” More loosely, “Reporting for duty, Lord!” He's indicating his availability, his attentiveness, “a preparedness to be at the service of another.”²¹ So now the God speaks again. “Take, please, your son,” he starts (Genesis 22:2). It's rare in the Bible for God to say please, but in Hebrew he does, even if our English translations gloss over it, so our heartbeat should pick up the pace. Then he starts laying it on thick: “Your son – your only one, whom you love – Isaac” (Genesis 22:2) – three direct objects, which are all the same object.²² This is the first time the Bible uses the word 'love,' and it's here. Abraham is supposed to take Isaac for something, and the God cautiously acknowledges that he's the son “passionately beloved of his father Abraham.”²³

Then what? “And walk yourself to the land of the moriah” (Genesis 22:2). “The moriah” is hard to translate, but it could mean the land of revelation, the land of teaching, or the land of fear.²⁴ More interesting is the verb, “go yourself,” which shows up just one other time in the whole Bible – Genesis 12. There, God's first words to Abram were to “walk yourself from your land and from your kindred and from the house of your father, to a land which I will make you see,” an unclear destination to be taken on faith (Genesis 12:1). Notice that what Abraham must abandon is his past identity, described in three narrowing ways; and here Abraham has to take a similar journey with a son described in three narrowing ways – this is a deliberate parallel.²⁵

In chapter 12, the 'going' would separate Abraham from his triply-described roots; but it sounds like here it'll be the opposite, taking his triply-described son along. Well, not so fast, Abraham. This is also a parting tale. “And raise him up there as an ascension offering,” or burnt offering, “upon one of the mountains which I shall say to you” (Genesis 22:2). This here is “the first time God gives instructions for a sacrifice,”²⁶ and shockingly it's a human sacrifice, and more than that, a suggestion Abraham should sacrifice his own beloved son. Even to suggest such a thing “goes against everything we know as moral and ethical.”²⁷

Pause for a moment to really soak in the horror grabbing hold of Abraham's fatherly heart. “A word has been uttered by God which is such as to shatter and try your faith,”²⁸ unleashing “an extremely bitter and turbulent throng of thoughts,”²⁹ leaving Abraham “torn between nature and faith and pulled both ways,”³⁰ dumping him suddenly into “an almost unimaginable moral dilemma.”³¹ On the one hand is his immensely affectionate love for Isaac, the irreplaceable child of his old age, the one in whom he's invested all his hopes and dreams on the earth. On the other is the God he's learned to trust, the one who gave him Isaac and promised him much through Isaac, and yet now at whose word Abraham's own “hand was chosen to be the sacrificial instrument of [Isaac's] death.”³² 

In light of this fuller command, that flowery description of Isaac becomes “the triple torment of the father.”³³ Isaac's name means 'he laughs' – maybe Abraham's now wondering if his life was just one long, dark prank at Abraham's expense, to give and then set the father up to violently ruin. If that weren't sad enough, this command calls God's reliability into question, since God appears to be contradicting himself.³⁴ It risks making Abraham's last forty years an exercise in pointlessness. What's Abraham to do?

Well, using a phrase from chapters 20 and 21, Abraham “rose early in the morning,” promptly commencing his compliance with the God's request. Abraham was “mastered by his love for God” and, despite the whirlwind within, “remained steadfast as ever.”³⁵ He loses himself in the busy work of packing, saddling his own donkey for the trip rather than letting his servants do it like normal, chopping wood here because his nervous hands need occupation; he's tarrying, dragging his feet, in hopes it'll turn out to have been a bad dream.³⁶ But when no relief came, “he arose, and he went to the place about which the God had spoken to him” (Genesis 22:3).

He'd been told simply to take Isaac, but “he took two of his boys with him and his son Isaac” (Genesis 22:3). The same word, 'boy,' was used for Ishmael last chapter and Isaac coming up (Genesis 21:12; 22:5). These are servants from Abraham's household, but possibly also Isaac's friends and peers, here to keep him company during a trip Abraham won't be much fun on. 

Their pilgrimage takes a couple days, long enough for Abraham to “give it second and third thoughts,” to make sure this is no impulsive compliance but a considered choice.³⁷ All the while, as Abraham is for days “torn to pieces with his thoughts” and tormented by Isaac's hugs and the meals they share,³⁸ he's “without anyone to share his dilemma with,” no therapist to visit or friend to lean on.³⁹ In every moment, he has the power to turn back and give himself relief. But he doesn't. Instead, step by step, he “obeyed the commands of God with a full and devoted patience.”⁴⁰

On the third morning of their pilgrimage, “Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar” (Genesis 22:4), much as Hagar lifted up her voice and sat down “afar” from Ishmael (Genesis 21:16).⁴¹ Some figure that Abraham stopped here “at a well of water.”⁴² There, to the servant boys, Abraham orders, “Stay here with the donkey.” The chieftain and his prince will “go over there,” for this is holy ground, and he can't risk that these boys will obstruct the plan.⁴³ At the place, he says, “we will worship” – and so they shall (Genesis 22:5). So far, so good, but then Abraham adds that “we will return to you” (Genesis 22:5). Wait, you will? Because if Abraham burns Isaac's corpse to a crisp, it seems like it's not a 'we' coming down the mountain. So either he's lying to stave off any suspicions, or he's speaking with a hope for an alternate ending.⁴⁴

Until now, the wood was on the donkey, but now Abraham takes it up, this wood meant to burn with Isaac, and he lays it on the boy's back (Genesis 22:6), that the son might unknowingly carry his instrument of destruction while marching to his dark end, that “the victim himself should bear the load.”⁴⁵ Talk about macabre! But it parallels how he earlier took a waterskin and laid it on Hagar's shoulder (Genesis 21:14). So while Isaac steps forward bearing the wood, Abraham holds in one hand the flintstone for sparking flame and in the other a big butcher's knife for dividing a sacrificial carcass in pieces. Side by side they walked, they “went both of them as one,” Abraham united with his unique one up the slow incline.

In these verses, the author reminds us again and again that they're father and son, using these words constantly, including the very first time Isaac speaks. Whereas the God had called out to Abraham, 'Father of Multitudes,' Isaac's first word is a cry to “my father.” How does Abraham answer? “Here I am, my son” (Genesis 22:7). Two little words in Hebrew, but so significant. Earlier, Abraham referred to Isaac just as “the boy,” emotionally distancing himself; but that tactic breaks down now as Abraham reaffirms Isaac as “my son.”⁴⁶ His declaration of availability, the same word he spoke earlier to the God, is a thread tying the tale together but raises the question of whether he can be fully responsive to both his child and his creator.⁴⁷

So what does Isaac want with Abraham? Well, he's got a question. “He said, 'Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?'” (Genesis 22:7). It's a really good question – so good, in fact, that I have to wonder why he's only asking now, and not yesterday on the road, about this lamb they forgot when they left home. Why didn't Isaac ask before, and why does he ask now? Is he getting uncomfortably suspicious about what will be sacrificed? Note how he calls attention to the fire and the wood, but avoids drawing dad's attention to the sharp instrument of slaughter, perhaps fearing lest it be meant for him.⁴⁸

The question puts Abraham in a bind. Does he risk a straightforward explanation? Does he make something up and hope his son buys it? “Abraham said, 'God will see for himself to the lamb for the burnt offering, my son'” (Genesis 22:8). Was he hinting at the prospect that God would make Isaac “be the lamb of the burnt offering”?⁴⁹ Or do his words maybe hold “faint tinges of hope... in the Lord to find us a way out of this,”⁵⁰ “expressing his confidence in God's intervention” in a way Abraham can't yet fathom?⁵¹ The result of this one and only time the Bible lets us hear them talking to each other is that, as two verses before, “they went both of them as one,” “walked with equal speed of mind... along the short straight road at the end of which is holiness, and came to the appointed place,”⁵² “the place of which the God had told him” (Genesis 22:8-9).

In days of yore, Abraham built an altar here, an altar there, but now “Abraham built the altar there,” on this bareheaded hill, and after adding the wood, “he bound Isaac his son, and he laid him on the altar on top of the wood” (Genesis 22:9). In a typical burnt offering, you'd bind the animal's feet together to immobilize it, do the bloody and divisive deed, and only then do you take the pieces and put them on the wood on the altar to be burned (Leviticus 1:3-9); but here, Abraham puts a whole living victim onto the altar, “altogether anomalous.”⁵³ But the more obvious question is how an Abraham in triple digits could wrestle a strong young man in his prime, who's fighting for his life with all his might, into submission. And the answer is, he obviously couldn't; if Isaac is bound by Abraham, it's because Isaac chooses to offer no resistance.⁵⁴ “Far from shrinking back or protesting against the deed,” an ancient preacher pointed out, “he submitted and yielded to what was being done by his father, and, like a lamb, lay on the altar without resistance, awaiting his father's arm.”⁵⁵

The time has come. Isaac's trussed up on the altar. “And Abraham sent out his hand, and he took the knife to slaughter his son” (Genesis 22:10). In this game of chicken with God, we're inches from the collision. This is the pivotal minute. Abraham, “whose obedience looks almost like insanity,”⁵⁶ clutches the upraised blade, its metal gleaming in the noonday sun, as “reverence for God aided his aged hand.”⁵⁷ If Abraham sought to somehow stop the scarring sight from becoming “a permanent feature of the son's psyche,” that vanishes here.⁵⁸ Oh, Abraham “did not hesitate to offer with his own hands his son as a victim while he obeyed God with the faith of devotion.”⁵⁹ Just one fateful motion remains.

And here's where the New Testament freezes the action to let us inside Abraham's mind and heart while he's “in the act of offering up his only-begotten” (Hebrews 11:7). Abraham had been assured by the LORD, before ever Isaac was conceived, that this child would one day have “his seed after him” (Genesis 17:19), and the LORD had more recently reaffirmed to Abraham that “through Isaac shall your seed be called” (Genesis 21:12). Both times, God had guaranteed Abraham, “he who received the promises,” that Isaac would become the father through whom Abraham's covenant line of seed would continue (Hebrews 11:17-18). But now Abraham is told to slash and burn Isaac to nothingness when Isaac is yet childless. So if “it is impossible for God to lie” (Hebrews 6:18), then if God's word is to be true, then either God will yield so that Isaac doesn't die, or God will let Abraham go through with the sacrifice but will act retroactively somehow.

So “by faith..., Abraham reasoned that God was able even to raise [Isaac] from the dead” here (Hebrews 11:19). He “believed that after Isaac died, he would be raised up again and would go back down with him,” because Abraham was certain the God of Truth “was not lying.”⁶⁰ Of course, it's one thing – a big thing – to say that on paper; it's another thing to live it out in action. But “absolute trust in God had permeated every aspect and level of Abraham's existence,” from mind to muscle.⁶¹ So as Abraham hoists high his blade, this is “certainly a great act of faith,” as well as being “a great work” of obedience.⁶²

Unpause the screen. In that moment, there called out an angelic voice from the sky (Genesis 22:11), much as during Ishmael's crisis “the Angel of God called to Hagar from heaven” (Genesis 21:17).⁶³ Not only does the Hebrew word for 'angel' sound a bit like this rare word for 'knife,'⁶⁴ but this is “the Angel of the LORD,” bringing back God's special covenant name, a very different connotation from the abstraction of “the God” who seemed to demand Isaac's blood and ashes. As the God had called Abraham's name once, now this Angel of the LORD calls out, “Abraham! Abraham!” twice in quick succession, arresting the first inches of the downswing. “God the Savior stopped the deed halfway.”⁶⁵ Abraham slams on the brakes, sacrifices his momentum, to say, for the third time, “Here I am,” “Behold me!” (Genesis 22:11).

This heavenly voice explains he's taken notice of Abraham's willing obedience, how “you have not withheld your son, your one and only, from me” (Genesis 22:12). So far, this word 'withheld' has shown up just once, in chapter 20, when the God 'withheld' King Abimelech from sinning the great sin of adultery with Abraham's wife and Isaac's future mother (Genesis 20:6). He did so because “I knew” Abimelech was acting in blamelessness of heart, in other words, that he feared God. So too, says the Angel, “Now I know that you,” Abraham, “fear God” (Genesis 22:12), his God-fearing heart being on display in action even beyond Abimelech's.⁶⁶

The LORD isn't looking for anything more than that. Abraham's ultimate willingness to obey, proven visibly as the knife began its descent, was what was desired, not Isaac's blood and ashes. Therefore, where the Angel of God bade Hagar lift “the boy” and hold him tightly with her “hand” (Genesis 21:18), now the Angel of the LORD urges Abraham to “not send forth your hand upon the boy” (Genesis 22:12).⁶⁷ Speaking more strictly than the God's initial request for Isaac aflame, Abraham is now abjured by a bolder name to do no harm to Isaac whatsoever. So “as he had obeyed in preparing to slay the boy, so he now obeyed in sparing him.”⁶⁸ The test is now over; Abraham was “found faithful in trial” (1 Maccabees 2:52). He'd received God's “severe command... with patience, and, had God so willed, he would have fulfilled it,”⁶⁹ “yielding with great love to God's will.”⁷⁰

Why test Abraham in the first place? The Angel's words pointing back to chapter 20 give us one reason. There, Abraham did to Abimelech what no one should do to another: set him up to sin a great sin. Why did Abraham do it? Because he dismissed the idea that anybody in Gerar could fear God, so he acted from the fear of man (Genesis 20:9-11). But who is Abraham, to prejudge where the fear of God may be found?⁷¹ This test challenges him, measuring his own “devotion to... the God who now demands the ultimate sacrifice.”⁷²

But it's bigger still. A few weeks back, we saw how Abraham's heart's truest desire was gradually unearthed and found to center in being a patriarch for a growing family; so naturally, once he's got the promised Isaac, he “thus reposed all his own happiness on the hope of leaving his son unscathed when he departed this life.”⁷³ God has been using Abraham's desire to lead him on, educate and remold him into the kind of man who can be father of nations, and as part of that education, we saw in chapter 21 how God bade Abraham surrender his firstborn son Ishmael to the desert, entrusting him to God's care. This is the almost inevitable sequel, testing whether Abraham's heart's desire has been fully recentered on God or not.

This test is the perfect way to cap off Abraham's journey, which began with a summons to never see again his own land, his family network, the father's house where he became Abram – to forsake his past. Now, as Abraham's season in the spotlight winds down, he faces God's summons to burn away the child of his love, who represents what Abraham has become and what he hopes to pass on – it's a call to relinquish his future.⁷⁴ These words fit hand-in-glove, asking whether Abraham can put both past and future, legacy and hope, in God's hands.

Fourth, this test changes something in the way God's dealt with Abraham. The LORD told him to leave for an unknown land, but promised to make him a blessed and great nation; therefore Abraham went (Genesis 12:1-4). The LORD told Abraham to walk before him in the covenant, but promised to make him a father of nations; so Abraham circumcised (Genesis 17). From all we've seen, it's possible Abraham's is a mercenary devotion built on a transactional logic: God commands and incentivizes, therefore I obey – to get what I want. But here, the God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, an act always reserved as the ultimate bargaining chip with the divine, and God offers no incentive other than pleasing him; it's only after Abraham renders an obedience without trade value that the Angel of the LORD will speak of further rewards (Genesis 22:17-18).⁷⁵ The test was necessary to make clear that Abraham knows “not to value above God what God gives us..., because God is to be loved free, gratis, and for nothing,” even though he proves himself to be a God who gives and rewards generously.⁷⁶

But is that true? Should Abraham be grateful that God solved a problem it seems like he created? Was this test an act of divine mercy or divine cruelty?⁷⁷ And as for Abraham, early Christians said the goal was “that the good man's virtue be revealed,”⁷⁸ but is it virtue or is it vice that he was willing to slay Isaac here? It can first be said that the sanctity of human life is founded on the image of God in man, but God, as the One whose image human life is, “has the right to give and to take away life.”⁷⁹ The “Lord of life and death” has the moral right to authorize an Abraham to do such a thing without sin.⁸⁰ As St. Augustine pointed out, “if Abraham sacrificed his son on his own initiative, what would he have been but a horrible and insane man? But under God's command, what is he seen to be but a faithful and devout man?”⁸¹ It's because Abraham's acting under a rightful authority. And lest this idea seem like a blank-check to religious justifications for anything and everything, supporting the popular (and problematic) “myth of religious violence,”⁸² we need to note that after thousands of years of having Genesis, this story's impact on its hearers and readers actually hasn't “led to a rash of child sacrifice.”⁸³ Those who admire Abraham's faith don't go around slaughtering others as a proof of their own faith.

It also matters that this was a “severe command which the Lord did not intend should be carried out.”⁸⁴ God “wished but to test his soul,” and had “no craving for human blood.”⁸⁵ There's remarkable mercy after the storm. Chapter 21 reached its climax when Hagar had her eyes opened and “saw a well of water,” giving her the option to go and take from it for her son's salvation (Genesis 21:16-19). In parallel, here Abraham “lifted up his eyes and, behold, one ram, caught in a thicket by his horns; and Abraham,” exercising this option, “went and took the ram... instead of his son” (Genesis 22:13), turning the altar from a symbol of death to a symbol of salvation⁸⁶ – in this way, “from death, Isaac was handed over living to his father.”⁸⁷ That was God's plan.

Was it a good plan? Well, Abraham genuinely needed this test. God tests “in order that a person may find out about himself..., bringing to light what was hidden in a person.”⁸⁸ He needed a deeper understanding of what it means to be God-fearing; he needed to see his own heart laid bare. This test came as a request, one he may have even been “free to refuse,” and the fulfillment of which would've been supererogatory, above and beyond the call of duty.⁸⁹ But in his willingness to completely and irrevocably give God the one he loved most in the world, Abraham's “love toward the Lord of all is made known,” to himself and to the world.⁹⁰

What about poor Isaac? Remember that he's old enough to resist and make mature decisions. And once he can see what's going on, he chooses to trust in his father's faith: if holy Abraham believes this will honor God, then Isaac can maturely comply, even if it means giving over his life to God. Later Jews took Isaac as accepting Abraham's explanation “with joy,”⁹¹ Isaac reasoning that he must have been “born into the world to be offered as a sacrifice to him who made me,” a privilege through which “my blessedness will be above that of all men.”⁹² So this is nothing like a story of child abuse; Isaac is no helpless victim, but a fully consenting participant.

This test is built on God's prior promises to Abraham. Because of them, Abraham did not have “faith by virtue of the absurd,” and his faith doesn't “begin precisely where thought stops,” as some allege. Instead, his faith and his reason walked together as one. Experience showed God's flawless track record in keeping the wildest promises; Abraham knew there remained promises for Isaac's future; therefore, Isaac must have a future, so if it looks like this obedience will end that future, no it won't, because God is true. Abraham reasoned from his faith in God's character to his faith in God's outcome. That makes a world of moral difference, because with this sure faith, Abraham's deed would be less like a murder and more like a surgery.⁹³ And as one great mystic teacher said, “God ordains our sufferings that we may love what we must desire, make greater sacrifices, and be worth more; but everything is brief, for it lasts only until the knife is raised, and then Isaac remains alive...”⁹⁴

And that surgery, while costly and painful, achieves benefits in their most fitting way. In every successful test in the Bible, the result is that “both parties learn that the other is trustworthy,” and this test achieves that for God and Abraham, making him indeed a “friend of God” (James 2:23).⁹⁵ Abraham's path isn't to “forget all love” for the sake of wrath out of fear for God's authority, as Luther mistakes it;⁹⁶ far from it, the test relies on Abraham loving Isaac intensely the whole way through.⁹⁷ Instead, the test makes him an integrated person able to simultaneously love the creation and offer it fully to the Creator, desiring both God and Isaac non-competitively.⁹⁸ Abraham keeps loving Isaac, but how he loves him has changed: not just his personally beloved son, but a son chosen by God for something greater.⁹⁹ Only with such love can Abraham become the patriarch of nations he dreams of.¹⁰⁰ And on the other side of his life-and-death ordeal, Isaac has ascended in his maturity, from boyhood to manhood, rendered ready for his calling.¹⁰¹

If this ordeal has integrated Abraham's fear and love, it's also integrated his “singular grace” with “Abraham's great merit before God.”¹⁰² St. Paul can honestly say that Abraham was initially justified by faith (Romans 4:2-5), and St. James can equally honestly teach that Abraham's “faith was completed by his works” (James 2:22) that were “credited to him as righteousness” (1 Maccabees 2:52), so that Abraham was ultimately “justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar” (James 2:21), yes, “justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24). He wins Isaac back as a gift – and as much more than a gift.

The result is that both will be compensated and rewarded for their faithful endurance, as the Angel of the LORD relays his sworn oath to magnify Abraham's blessing and make his seed through Isaac ever more fruitful and victorious, a source of universal blessing, “because you have hearkened to my voice” (Genesis 22:17-18). The next couple weeks can teach us of the blessings unleashed into the world by this event, but suffice it to say they'll vastly eclipse the darkness of one day, as both Abraham and Isaac would gladly tell you if you could hear them this morning. “What lovelier reward, after all, can you get from God than God himself?”¹⁰³ What seemed a devastatingly dark decree was an instrument meant to lead Abraham on a journey to his clarity, his obedience, his integration, his fulfillment, his blessing – to fruits borne only among such thorns as these.¹⁰⁴

Do we have to dread a command like what Abraham received? No. For forty years, Abraham has lived in a world “in which God's revelation and miraculous involvement in human affairs is taken for granted.”¹⁰⁵ He's heard God's voice on multiple occasions, met God, verified the promises. All this was necessary to ensure that he could know for certain in this case that he was hearing the actual voice of God, and not a delusion in his head or a misreading of a sign or a deception of a demon or a demand of human corruption. Anyone without a biography like Abraham's could and should chalk up a call like this to other causes;¹⁰⁶ Abraham uniquely could be entrusted with it. He also lived in a world where “barbarian nations... have for long admitted child sacrifice as a holy deed,” and he's living there before the Law, so it could be initially plausible for him that the God might ask such a thing;¹⁰⁷ but we live after a more definitive revelation of the LORD's will that such sacrifice would be an unthinkable “abomination” in his sight (Jeremiah 32:35).¹⁰⁸ Plus, Abraham's test also relies on the context of his special assurances regarding Isaac's future children and his own destiny to be a father to nations; the one gives him extraordinary grounds for believing, while the latter explains how “to whom much was given, of him much will be required” (Luke 12:48).¹⁰⁹ So rest assured that “all of these services are not asked of you.”¹¹⁰

And yet Paul calls us “children of Abraham” (Romans 9:7), and Jesus teaches that the children of Abraham will “do the works of Abraham” (John 8:39). “Let us imitate Abraham, the friend of God,”¹¹¹ whose sacrificial faith was to “prove an occasion of instruction... for later generations.”¹¹² But how, then, do we learn from him here?

Start with this: many words from God might confuse us, and we're well-practiced to reject instructions whose rationale we don't instantly grasp. But from Abraham we see how it brings “countless blessings for us that we... fulfill his directions like dutiful servants and leave to the Lord the reason for them.”¹¹³ See, “the evidence we seek in knowing God is not going to become available to us until we make the journey to Moriah.”¹¹⁴ For “unless you shall fulfill the works of faith, unless you shall be obedient to all the commands, even the more difficult ones..., you will not know that you fear God.”¹¹⁵ It's good to cherish that we've been saved by grace through faith, but Abraham's story calls us further, to complete our faith in our works (James 2:20-24).

Then, we can understand that God is calling us, in Abraham, to find “a proper loyalty to the world and its finite goods” in the context of our absolute devotion to God, by understanding them as gifts we consecrate back to him one and all.¹¹⁶ We're bound, not to sacrifice a beloved child to God, but to render him “the inward sacrifice” of our heart and mind and soul¹¹⁷ – “a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your logical worship” (Romans 12:1), which leads us to a more supreme love of all. And “God takes more pleasure in this than in all the other things put together, a special gift, a faultless gift.”¹¹⁸ Abraham's test challenges us to lay our all on the altar – and reminds us how dear that all is, not that we might cease to love it, but that we might love it more perfectly in the hands of the LORD. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hope for the Outcast

It seems like last Sunday we heard the world about the child of promise, Isaac, the miracle baby born to be heir. Simple as it'd be to roll right along, there's another tale to tell, the story of the path not taken. What's the deal with big bro Ishmael? Does he matter to God? Should he matter to us? Is he biblical trash, or buried treasure?

We've heard enough by now where his saga begins: Sarah's barrenness prods her finally to use her maidservant, a new acquisition from Egypt, as a substitute wife and surrogate womb; Hagar conceives, but the situation gets sticky; Sarah lashes out; Hagar runs off through the desert toward home, hauling this unborn life with her; her travel is stopped at a spring by an intervening angel, who redirects Hagar back to her house of slavery. For “you are pregnant, and you shall bear a son,” says the messenger, and “you shall call his name Ishmael,” which means 'heard by God,' “because the LORD has heard your affliction” (Genesis 16:11). In this start to his existence, “Ishmael received his name from the Lord he was born,”¹ one of a handful of people in the Bible who could say that. It's “a very beautiful name,” too, signifying that God hears the cries of the afflicted.²

So, adds the angel, this coming Ishmael “shall be a wild donkey of a man” (Genesis 16:12). The wild donkey, or Syrian onager, was “a tough and swift animal that roamed the desert freely,”³ “sturdy, fearless, and fleet-footed..., impossible to domesticate.”⁴ The “arid plain” is its God-given “home,” and it “hears not the shouts of his driver” but “searches after every green thing” (Job 39:5-8). It was to this creature that the Assyrians compared a “queen of the Arabs” who retreated back to the desert after a battle.⁵ Such a beast, such a person, is amazingly free – the opposite of Hagar's near-future! – but will, therefore, have to live in a condition of “incessant struggle,” constantly fighting to preserve that cherished freedom against “all who desire to subdue him”⁶ – hence, it'll be “his hand against everyone and everyone's hand against him.” He's the prototype of those who “wander with no fixed abode and often invade all the nations who border on the desert, and they are attacked by all.”⁷ And “to the face of all his brothers shall he dwell” (Genesis 16:12), a deliberately ambiguous line which could suggest an in-your-face defiance of his kin or a constant presence local to his kin.⁸

With these promises in mind, Hagar obediently retreats from the desert to Abram's encampment, where “Hagar bore Abram a son,” and the boy's 86-year-old father legitimized him, naming him Ishmael in accordance with Hagar's desert encounter (Genesis 16:15-16). Now, if God didn't have plans for this boy, “why not just let Hagar flee with her unborn child” all the way to Egypt?⁹ He could've carried an Egyptian name, lived a nice Egyptian life, faded into the sands of time. But God wanted Ishmael tutored in the House of Abraham, because God had a purpose for Ishmael's life, regardless of the human purposes initially underlying his conception.

For thirteen years Ishmael was raised as the promised son, until there came a revelation and covenant renewal, wherein God told Abraham that it was another who'd been meant all along – that the promises would be brought through a son of Sarah who didn't yet exist (Genesis 17:1-16). Not only did Abraham collapse in hysterics at the thought (Genesis 17:17), but he petitioned God: “If only Ishmael might live before your face!” (Genesis 17:18). Implicitly he begs God to scrap the Isaac plan, because for all Ishmael's unruly quirks, Abraham has come to affectionately treasure this firstborn son, so he wants Ishmael to carry all promises, get all blessings, own all the land, bask in the light of God. Abraham “showed his love for Ishmael in what he said.”¹⁰

God denies Abraham's implicit request to keep Sarah out of destiny's loop; her son will be the chosen bearer of the covenant line (Genesis 17:19). But does that mean God rejects Abraham's plea entirely? Absolutely not: “I accept as well your prayer about Ishmael; you see, I have heeded your petition.”¹¹ “As for Ishmael, I have heard you,” God says (Genesis 17:20). Just like Isaac's name was justified first by a father's laughter and then by a mother's (Genesis 17:17; 18:12), so Ishmael's name is originally based on his mom's affliction over him heard by God and now rooted more deeply by his dad's prayer for him being heard by God.¹² “Behold, I have blessed him” – God's choice of Isaac “does not mean rejecting” Ishmael,¹³ who will live in “God's spiritual and material care”¹⁴ – “and will make him fruitful and multiply him greatly,” like the sons of Noah (Genesis 9:7). “Ishmael inherits the Abrahamic promise but not the Abrahamic covenant.”¹⁵ “Twelve princes shall he beget, and I will give him as a great nation” (Genesis 17:20), a prototype for the later tribes of Israel.¹⁶ In response to promises like these, by the end of the day both Abraham and Ishmael are circumcised (Genesis 17:26), a sign of daring inclusion as if in partial protest of God's exclusion of Ishmael from covenant and land.¹⁷

By the time Ishmael's healed, three travelers are hosted in the camp; it only gradually becomes obvious that they are God and his angels. Sarah eavesdrops on them from the tent, and a later Jewish retelling adds that “Ishmael was standing behind her, listening.”¹⁸ Ishmael may mean 'heard by God,' but here he's a silent hearer of God, perhaps even catching an advance glimpse of the face of Christ. The next day, as Ishmael's dad mourns the apparent death of Lot, the cousin Ishmael never got to know, they flee briefly to the desert regions Ishmael once haunted in utero (Genesis 20:1), before retreating to Beersheba, where Ishmael likely has a hand in digging the well (Genesis 21:30); there, Sarah complicates Ishmael's life by birthing his half-brother Isaac (Genesis 21:2-5).

Ishmael's around sixteen or seventeen when his dad throws a party for little Isaac's weaning, where Ishmael's reaction sparks the severe judgment of Sarah that he and his mom need to go, to nullify their legal title to any inheritance in the house (Genesis 21:8-10). There we left off last Sunday, with Sarah's demand, and “this word was exceedingly bad in Abraham's eyes on account of his son,” from whom Abraham would hate to be parted (Genesis 21:11). In his judgment, Sarah's diktat is “harsh, repugnant, and oppressive,” and her snubbing of his flesh and blood in Ishmael is detestable.¹⁹ But God sides with Sarah's outcome, if not her reasons, because of his plans for both boys (Genesis 21:12). God reassures his friend that Ishmael won't come to harm because of this relinquishment, that “a great future awaits Ishmael” out there in the wider world.²⁰ “I will make a nation of 'the son of the slave woman' also, because he is your seed” – out of love for obedient Abraham, God will build a whole nation out of Ishmael's legacy (Genesis 21:13).

Therefore “Abraham rose early in the morning” – “though he loved the child, he did what the Lord commanded,”²¹ by taking “bread and a skin of water, and he gave to Hagar, placing it on her shoulder” with his own two hands. Only after this goodbye did he bring “the child” and hand him over to walk by his mother's side; then “he sent her away” (Genesis 21:14). How could God endorse this expulsion, we want to ask, Abraham “cruelly casting out his own flesh”?²² But is it cruel? Hagar once fled with the unborn Ishmael into the desert, questing after her freedom, and we fussed over God sending her back into abusive slavery; should we fuss again while Hagar and Ishmael are being made free at last, free at last (thank God Almighty!)?

Still, isn't some bread and a single big pouch of water “hopelessly inadequate,” a recipe for doom?²³ But by this inadequate human provision, Abraham “expressed his trust in the divine promises” that God would look after these two as his own people, would be forever true to his word of blessing for Ishmael.²⁴ And where Sarah demanded Abraham 'drive out' the pair like when God 'drove out' Adam from the garden and Cain from the ground (Genesis 3:24; 4:14), Abraham “sent her away,” a word that can describe a divorce, or the release of a slave, but also sending forth an army (2 Samuel 18:2) – or sending out apostles!²⁵ This is Hagar and Ishmael's exodus from their house of slavery (Exodus 11:1), “a dismissal with blessing,” even a commissioning.²⁶

Hagar, taking the lead role to start their mission, “wandered in the desert of Beersheba,” which was near where they'd started from. This same woman who, when pregnant, made a confident beeline through the harsh desert, is now so distraught she gets mixed up in a more forgiving desert.²⁷ The result was “hopeless and aimless travel.”²⁸ As their finite quantity of portable potables reached its end, dehydration began to set in. So what's Hagar to do? “She threw the child under one of the bushes,” unceremoniously dumping Ishmael somewhere that at least offered shade,²⁹ “and she went and sat down opposite him the distance of a bowshot away” (Genesis 21:14-16), martial language giving the sense of “a violent act of maternal rejection” of the weakened son.³⁰ Broken-hearted, she couldn't bear to watch her son suffer, so she withdrew from him. But from Ishmael's point of view, he “considered her lost” while he was cast out and cast off, alone and “abandoned as dead.”³¹

In that dire crisis, “God heard.” But it wasn't Hagar's uplifted voice and tears God heard; “God heard the voice of the boy” as he moaned or prayed (Genesis 21:17). First, Ishmael was Ishmael because God heard Hagar's affliction; then, Ishmael was Ishmael because God heard Abraham's intercession; lastly, Ishmael becomes fully Ishmael when God hears his own voice of woe beneath a desert shrub! So “the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, 'What troubles you, Hagar?'” – a question about as sensitive as swinging by hospice and asking visitors, 'Why so glum?' – but the heavenly voice then adds: “Fear not! For God has heard the voice of the boy where he is,” where Hagar isn't but should've been (Genesis 21:17).³² As she'd earlier lifted her voice, now she needs to get up, “lift the boy, and hold him fast with your hand,” to reconnect with the throwaway son, to be abidingly present to strengthen and support and guide him in his new desert life, for out there “I will make him into a great nation” (Genesis 21:18). This is just what God had told Abraham about Ishmael's destiny (Genesis 17:20), no less true in the desert than at home.

In that moment, “God opened her eyes,” as if “enlightened with a new light of the Holy Spirit,”³³ with with open eyes “she saw a well of water” (Genesis 21:19). Hagar earlier found heaven at a well where she praised the God of Seeing, who saw her and whom she saw in the angel; now God gives sight to her tear-dimmed eyes so she can see water in the desert, a timely provision for her son's needs. Where she feared to see her son die, there she sees the hope of life! No wonder the Greek version calls it a “well of living water.”³⁴ So “she went and filled the skin with water,” back to its fullness, “and she gave the boy a drink” of salvation (Genesis 21:19). Then Hagar could, as directed, take Ishmael by the hand, hold him tight, lift him to his feet, and help him on.

Only on the other side of a brush with death could Ishmael begin the life he was meant for. Now we hear how “God was with the boy” as he grew up. Set aside all thoughts of Ishmael as cursed, unwanted, or exiled by God; he was “one whom [God] deemed worthy of his care” and company.³⁵ “The providence of God watched over Ishmael” through his life, to bless him and nurture him and welcome him.³⁶ “And he dwelt in the desert,” like a wild donkey should, “and he became a master of the bow” (Genesis 21:20), having learned from his trial to long to bridge the distance 'a bowshot away' could make. He becomes now, by necessity, “a skilled hunter and an aggressive fighter,” as one must be in the desert wild.³⁷ But even as a master of the bow, Ishmael learned from his Divine Helper that surely “the grace of God is the greatest security.”³⁸

Specifically, “he dwelt in the Desert of Paran” (Genesis 21:21), the place south of the Negev, “in the expanses of the Sinai Peninsula,” which Israel would later reach after leaving the mountain (Numbers 10:12; 13:26).³⁹ Paran might've been an old name for the whole peninsula, but it was at least the south end and the east side of the central plateau.⁴⁰ There, in that region of future significance to Moses, Ishmael made a home, “hereafter to reign over that country,”⁴¹ “and his mother took a wife for him from the land of Egypt” (Genesis 21:21), binding him more closely to her side of his heritage, but without snuffing out his blessing as Abraham's wild son.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that's the close of Ishmael's story, but it's not at all. In chapters we haven't seen yet, Abraham will similarly arrange a marriage for Isaac from among his people; and where is Isaac when that happens? When he meets a bride-to-be, “Isaac had returned from Beer-lahai-roi and was dwelling in the Negev” (Genesis 24:62). If that first place sounds familiar, it should; it's where the angel first gave Hagar all those nice promises. Why would Isaac have been visiting there? There's one obvious answer. Isaac was just a kid when Ishmael was sent away, and no doubt his mom refused to let him indulge his curiosity about his older half-brother; now that she's gone, he feels free at last to venture out in search of Ishmael at an Ishmael place.⁴²

Now fast-forward through the decades. Widowed Abraham took another wife, Keturah or 'Incense,' and now he claims six more sons, whom he finally “sent away... from his son Isaac, eastward to the east country” (Genesis 25:1-6). These sons represent the trade route which brought incense up from Arabia to Syria.⁴³ After that is the last day of Abraham, who “breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people” when “Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him” (Genesis 25:8-9). We shouldn't take it for granted. When Abraham dies, these two original sons are brought back together to take care of his remains, to cooperate in honoring their half-shared legacy from him. Over just the past sixty years, the tomb of Abraham has been the site of assaults, desecrations, explosions, and mass shootings. If Abraham's death could bring Isaac and Ishmael closer then, oughtn't this ongoing violence move them to lay aside their fears and meet again now?

After this, we hear that “Isaac settled at Beer-lahai-roi” (Genesis 25:11). He isn't just poking around now, looking in on Ishmael's past; with Abraham gone, Isaac becomes voluntarily a neighbor to the brother he'd like to get to know anew. The move inspires a prospect for “positive ongoing relationships among those who call Abraham their father,”⁴⁴ a vision that all who look to Abraham as their root might “live in peace and harmony with each other,” might get to know one another and dwell face-to-face as brethren.⁴⁵

How do things wrap up for Ishmael? He had sons and daughters – more on that in a moment – and then, forty-eight years after the death of Abraham, Ishmael “breathed his last and died and was gathered to his people” (Genesis 25:17). Some have accused Ishmael, in accepting Hagar's arrangement of his marriage to an Egyptian wife, of abandoning his legacy from Abraham, of becoming “lost to God's new way.”⁴⁶ But that doesn't seem to be true. Likelier is Luther's judgment that “Ishmael was not cut off from salvation and eternal life,” but instead God was with him to the end, to make him (we hope) “a saint and a great patriarch.”⁴⁷ Perhaps he'll wait in the realms below, in his father Abraham's bosom, for the crucified Christ to come and shine light on him.

Behind him here, Ishmael leaves children. As Jews said in hindset, Abraham “sired a wild donkey..., and the wild donkeys multiplied,”⁴⁸ though Genesis in fact “is not disparaging of him or his descendants.”⁴⁹ Abraham was promised Ishmael would father twelve princes (Genesis 17:20), and here they are “by their villages and by their encampments, twelve princes according to their tribes” (Genesis 25:16), “the sons of Ishmael by their names according to their generations: Nebaioth the firstborn of Ishmael, Qedar, Adbeel, Mibsam, Mishma, Dumah, Massa, and Hadad, Tema, and Yetur, Naphish, Qedemah” (Genesis 25:13-15). We're also told that they “settled from Havilah to Shur (which is upon the face of Egypt), in the direction of Asshur” (Genesis 25:18).

What's all that mean? The region from Havilah to Shur stretches from Kuwait in the east across the north Arabian desert into the Sinai Peninsula to the borders of Egypt; later Jews summarized this as “the whole country extending from the Euphrates to the Red Sea.”⁵⁰ Adding on the reference to Assyria invites us to add what's north of that, the Syrian Desert. That's where to find the offspring of Ishmael. Two of the sons' names are north Arabian oasis-cities: Dumah, “the fortress of the Arabs,” and Tayma in northwest Arabia.⁵¹ Most of the other sons are known tribal groups, especially Nebayot and Qedar; and the last of the sons, Qedemah, just means 'of the east.'⁵² A later Syrian writer remarked that “the desert is full of this race from the borders of Egypt to Babylon.”.⁵³ There “on the face of all his brothers he fell” (Genesis 25:18), a curious phrase that could mean lying in wait to strike (cf. Judges 7:12) or to enthusiastically embrace his brethren (cf. Genesis 50:1).

In the days of the judges, Israel occasionally fought with Ishmaelites, as when Gideon killed two Ishmaelite chiefs and took their gold earrings and the crescent necklaces from their camels (Judges 8:21-26), or when the eastern tribes took thousands of captives from Yetur, Naphish, and the Hagarites (1 Chronicles 5:18-22). But it wasn't all bad: two of the south Ishmaelite peoples, Mibsam and Mishma, were absorbed into Israel's tribe of Simeon (1 Chronicles 4:25).⁵⁴ By David's time, he had an Ishmaelite brother-in-law whose son Amasa was briefly the military chief of Israel (2 Samuel 17:25; 20:9-12), and David's chief camel steward was “Obil the Ishmaelite” (1 Chronicles 27:30). Israel's later king Ahab made common cause with “Gindibu the Arab,” king of Qedar.⁵⁵ Later, when Assyrians “struck down... faraway Arabs who live in the desert,”⁵⁶ Isaiah's “oracle concerning Arabia” urged the “inhabitants of the land of Tayma” to bring bread and water to the refugees, for soon “all the glory of Qedar will come to an end, and the remainder of the archers of the mighty men of the sons of Qedar will be few” (Isaiah 21:13-17). On the Babylonians invasion of northern Arabia, Jeremiah calls it the wrath of God shared with “all the kings of Arabia” (Jeremiah 25:24), a judgment on “Qedar and the realms of encampments that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon struck down” (Jeremiah 49:28).⁵⁷

Babylon's final king Nabonidus (father of Daniel's Belshazzar) spent a whole decade away at Tayma and campaigned as far south as Yathrib (the future Medina) to subdue Arab tribes,⁵⁸ and once Israel's exiles came home, one of Governor Nehemiah's fiercest opponents was “Geshem the Arab” (Nehemiah 2:19). By this time, if not sooner, the pagan Arabs worshipped (among others) a warrior god, the morning star, born to a mother goddess to watch over his cult initiates, figures who seem a bit like Ishmael and Hagar (whose name suggests, in Arabic, a sanctuary);⁵⁹ and, in fact, the name 'Ishmael' crops up often in Ancient North Arabian inscriptions.⁶⁰ So, totally understandably, Jews and Christians came to tighten their mental connections between Ishmael and the Arabs even more, calling them “Arabs or Ishmaelites,”⁶¹ crediting Ishmael as “the founder of [the Arabs'] race,”⁶² from whom came the biblical “twelve Arab tribes,”⁶³ including in the newer Nabataean “Arabian nation,”⁶⁴ whose core may have been the descendants of Qedar.⁶⁵

Some Jews boasted over them, emphasizing how “the LORD did not draw Ishmael and his sons... near to himself, and he did not elect them.”⁶⁶ When Christ was born, he was feared and loathed immediately by Herod, himself half-Arab due to his mother's status as a Nabataean princess.⁶⁷ But when Christ was crucified, resurrected, ascended, and poured down his Spirit at Pentecost, in the crowd were Arabian Jews (or Jewish Arabs?), ready to be converted and catch the holy fire (Acts 2:11). A few years later, when Paul first became an apostle, he says he “went away into Arabia” for a bit, likely preaching the gospel to them before others.⁶⁸

After the Nabataean collapse, the Romans began collectively calling the north Arabian tribes 'Saracens,' people “whom,” in one pagan Roman's words, “we never found desirable either as friends or as enemies..., whose original abode extends from the Assyrians to the cataracts of the Nile..., all alike warriors of equal rank, half-nude..., ranging widely with the help of swift horses and slender camels..., without fixed abodes or laws.”⁶⁹ To Christians of the time, these 'Saracens' were just a new name for “the tribes of the Hagarenes or Ishmaelites,”⁷⁰ for “the desert is inhabited by those who boast of Ishmael as their ancestor.”⁷¹

Archaeologists notice that all over fourth-century Arabia, “traditional temple worship largely disappeared,” to be replaced by something new.⁷² At that very time, we start hearing reports about “the churches of Christ... in the wildernesses of the Saracens..., since these people were transformed from darkness to the... light of the nations.”⁷³ In the Syrian Desert there lived a holy man “grown from Ishmaelite stock” who “grasped the very kingdom of heaven,”⁷⁴ while we meet an Arab chief who, after a desert monk healed his paralytic son, converted and became a bishop, while his people came en masse to be baptized, becoming “heirs of the promise..., the rational flock of Christ,” learning “to worship the One who is God over all.”⁷⁵ Soon “the inhabitants of north Arabia... were won over to Christianity in large numbers in this period,”⁷⁶ and “most northern Arabian tribes... converted to Christianity” – the gospel was for Ishmael!⁷⁷

“The gospel of Christ... did reach them, and they accepted God's message,” said one early medieval Christian, but despite this, “they were wickedly seduced by certain pseudo-prophets.”⁷⁸ From the sixth century on, as wars and plagues and Christian divisions roiled the world with turmoil, a smattering of supposed prophets began to crop up in Arabia.⁷⁹ One of them was a man named Muhammad from the west Arabian town of Mecca, where his tribe, the Quraysh, oversaw the Ka'ba, a cubic shrine built in the same style as many Arabian churches and synagogues at the time.⁸⁰ You've likely heard of him; his message of submission (islam) to God is quite famous.

Against Jews and Christians who dismissed Ishmael as an outcast or a menace, Muhammad insisted Ishmael was “among the excellent.”⁸¹ Ishmael's whole life was proof that “my Lord is the Hearer of supplications,” a great biblical relief for Arabian pagans who thought the gods inevitably “lost interest and abandoned” them to merciless Fate, “leaving their prayers unanswered.”⁸² Ishmael, he insisted, “was true to the promise, and he was a messenger, a prophet” who “was pleasing unto his Lord” as Father Abraham had been.⁸³ Under Muhammad's leadership, the peoples of Arabia newly “fashioned a religious pedigree for themselves” out of Ishmael's story.⁸⁴ As he retold it, Abraham didn't sent Hagar and Ishmael out solo, but he led them to a divinely designated place, not the Sinai Peninsula but Mecca itself; there, Abraham gave them dates and a water-skin and entrusted them to God's care. As the Abraham of the Qur'an says, “I have settled some of my progeny in a valley without cultivation.”⁸⁵ In this version, when water ran out, Hagar ran back and forth between two hills, Safa and Marwa, to spy out water or help; only after her seventh journey did an angel come to Ishmael and, with foot or wing, strike the earth and cause a spring called Zamzam to flow. Then, as in Jewish lore Hagar met shepherds who helped sustain her in the desert, so in Muslim tradition this water source attracted an Arab tribe, the Jurhum, who stayed with them, taught Ishmael Arabic, and provided him an Arab wife, not an Egyptian one as in the Bible.⁸⁶

With them, Ishmael became “a great archer,”⁸⁷ but also “a prophet” who “used to bid his people to prayer and almsgiving.”⁸⁸ In the Muslim version, Abraham used to get Sarah's permission to visit Ishmael in the Arabian desert, and on the third such visit, God “made a covenant with Abraham and Ishmael: 'Purify My House'” at Mecca for divine worship there, “a place of visitation for mankind and a sanctuary.”⁸⁹ To this day, every Muslim visits the Ka'ba complex in Mecca, where they orbit it as Abraham's sanctuary, run between Safa and Marwa to commemorate Hagar's search for water, and then drink water from the Zamzam, Ishmael's well.⁹⁰ As Abraham and Ishmael built their desert temple, Muhammad claimed, they prayed for God to accept its goodness and to raise up from the descendants of Ishmael “a community submitting” to God in prayer and worship, and also “to raise up in their midst a messenger from among them, who will recite thy signs to them and will teach them the Book and Wisdom.”⁹¹ Muhammad presented himself as that messenger descended from Ishmael, sent in long-awaited fulfillment of Abraham's and Ishmael's prayers; his followers have ever since claimed to be “the real and legitimate heirs of the legacy of Abraham and Ishmael.”⁹²

As they advanced out from their desert home, reception was mixed, to say the least. Christians were perplexed by a people “come forth from the desert, the offspring of Hagar..., who hold fast to the covenant of Abraham,”⁹³ having “turned to the living God who had appeared to their father Abraham,”⁹⁴ yet whose beliefs constitute “the superstition of the Ishmaelites”⁹⁵ and who “mock us and increase their blasphemies against Christ and the Church, and... boast of conquering the entire world.”⁹⁶ In such hostility they saw Ishmael's hand raised against everyone, “an enemy to generations of men.”⁹⁷ While some hoped that with repentance and faith they could yet “blunt the Ishmaelite sword,”⁹⁸ others feared this meant “the arrival of the Antichrist.”⁹⁹ But all conceded that, for reasons of his mysterious providence, “the triumph of the sons of Ishmael, who subdued and subjugated these two mighty kingdoms, was from God.”¹⁰⁰

For their part, the Muslims who came afterward insisted it confirmed the favor shown to Hagar's “pure offspring Ishmael and Muhammad,”¹⁰¹ declaring that with them God had at last brought about “Ishmael's blessing, glory, and high standing over the rest of the children of Abraham,”¹⁰² now that “the prophethood passed to Ishmael's offspring, and kings bowed to him, nations submitted to him,”¹⁰³ so that God's promises to Abraham were being fulfilled as “the People of Ishmael... rose as high above [other nations] as” the stars over the earth, with “an everlasting empire which God said would not come to an end.”¹⁰⁴

And here we are, living in a very different world, but Ishmael's legacy is still a challenge for us to grapple with. We know that the Islamic story of Ishmael requires a distortion of the prior biblical witness of Abraham's life, that Isaac was alone chosen to continue the covenantal pledge of a future Seed who would be Christ the Lord, that even Ishmael's sons ultimately “needed all that God would do through Israel” and Israel's Messiah,¹⁰⁵ and that the Qur'anic message can't be true in all the places it “effectively sidelines Jesus and the Bible.”¹⁰⁶ Bluntly, not only is the Qur'an one-dimensional compared to the Bible's fullness, but the Qur'an erroneously rejects the status of Jesus Christ as God and as Son of God,¹⁰⁷ caricatures the basic Christian doctrine of the Trinity,¹⁰⁸ and is commonly understood to deny even the historicity of Christ's crucifixion (and, thus, his resurrection).¹⁰⁹ To justify any of this, Islam is founded on a wildly implausible conspiracy theory, holding that the Bible as we've always known it was fabricated to obscure the original Scriptures revealed to Moses, David, and Jesus.¹¹⁰

None of this is good; much of this is spiritually dangerous. And yet there are in the world now over a billion Muslims who claim Ishmael as, in some way, a spiritual forefather, even if not a fleshly one. Is it possible that, in some way, these all “are who they are because God has kept promises” about Ishmael's bright future?¹¹¹ When we're troubled by what we hear and see, can we train our thoughts on the faithfulness of God and trust in “God's purposeful design in the history of Ishmael”?¹¹² Is there a mystery of providence at work that we just don't yet understand, but which we'll see and appreciate and rejoice over when faith at last becomes sight? Can there be some way that God means a great goodness to come through and out of Ishmael's legacy as we see it?

All that Abraham begged God to give Ishmael could never be complete without “a life from God in the highest sense,”¹¹³ and whether the sons and daughters of Ishmael know it or not, Christ as Son of God is the true Well of Living Water from which dying Ishmael's thirst can be quenched, “and so, drinking, they will live through him!”¹¹⁴ What we're seeing now in the house of Ishmael can't yet be God's final word. Genesis has outlined “promises for the final victory of the kingdom of God” among all who lay claim to Ishmael's legacy.¹¹⁵ Isaiah foretold a future where the glory of the LORD would dawn through Christ: “A multitude of camels shall cover you...; all those from Sheba shall come, they shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall bring good news, the praises of the LORD. All the flocks of Qedar shall be gathered to you, the rams of Nebaioth shall minister to you; they shall come up with acceptance on my altar, and I will beautify my beautiful house” (Isaiah 60:5-7). In their rightful biblical context, such a prophecy isn't a prediction of Islam and its Ka'ba; no, it urges us on beyond Islam's lifespan, to hope for a future “voluntary response to the salvific light” of Jesus Christ.¹¹⁶ So “let the desert and its cities lift up their voice, the villages that Qedar inhabits” (Isaiah 42:11)!

Christ had bade his apostles, and through them his whole Church, to “disciple all nations” (Matthew 28:18), “to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of [Christ's] name among all the nations” (Romans 1:5) – and could that possibly exclude the “great nation” of Ishmael (Genesis 17:20)? We've heard how once great advances were made; we trust they must be again. But how could we ever disciple those we disdain to be near? Look to Isaac at Beer-lahai-roi, choosing to be a neighbor, choosing to take the initiative in hopes of getting to know the half-brother he half-remembered. If the Church doesn't move to make the People of Ishmael her neighbor, if the Church doesn't step out to say hello, if the Church doesn't set foot at Beer-lahai-roi, then we are not being the children of promise, the laughter-spreaders; we are not being Isaacs, and we are not heeding Christ. To love the People of Ishmael as a neighbor calls us to “participate in joyful moments with them,” to be human with them as people, not as bogeymen from a stereotype.¹¹⁷ These days, it means also to “weep with them that weep” (Romans 12:15), something so many have ever more cause to do.

But for those of us who can't move and who have a hard time seeking out a neighbor, what we can do at least, what we must do, is to renew Abraham's prayer: “Oh, that Ishmael might live before you!” (Genesis 17:20). We can pray that God does abundant good to the children of Ishmael, that he blesses richly all who adhere in some way to Ishmael's legacy – that he would grant them life in the presence of God, life in Christ, by opening the eyes of their minds and hearts to the gospel. Or have we no hope any longer in the Lord who's a hearer of our supplications, the Savior who snatches Ishmael from the brink of death, the God who opens Hagar's eyes to the refreshment that's been waiting for her all along?

That's my charge to you this week. Reflect on Ishmael's story. Consider where it's led. Marvel at the mystery of the faithfulness of God, working out purposes we don't yet understand. Remember that “the Son of God, Jesus Christ..., was not Yes and No, but... all the promises of God find their Yes in him” (2 Corinthians 1:19-20). Pray for a deeper love for the bearers of Ishmael's legacy. Pray for a mightier faith in God's work among them. Pray for a profounder hope in the peace that's in store when Abraham and Isaac and Ishmael are one new man in the peace of Christ, worshipping in one beautiful House of God, the Church. Then each and all will say that “you, O God, have heard my vows; you have given me the heritage of those who fear your name” (Psalm 61:5). Then “blessed are those who dwell in your house, ever singing your praise” (Psalm 84:4). “So will I ever sing praises to your name, as I perform my vows day after day” on the pilgrimage to Paradise (Psalm 61:8) – the Way to which is Christ, and the Destination of which is Christ, who is the Hope of every outcast, the Hearer of every supplication, the Abundance in every desert, and the Love that never lets us go. Amen.