The Akedah (Binding of Isaac)

An excerpt from The Jesus Way by Eugene Peterson

The Akedah was a three-day journey for Abraham, but it cannot be understood apart from a hundred years of road-tested faith that comprises the Abraham story. The way of Abraham is the first chapter of the people of God to whom Abraham is father, the one in whom all the people of the earth will be blessed. Abraham furnishes the context that permeates everything that follows. The Akedah is not isolated, not a text without a context; it is a summing up and clarification of a long life of reorientation from the ziggurat of Ur to the altar on Moriah, from self-aggrandizement to God-gifting.

God has tested Abraham’s faith at every turn. To live by faith – better, to live a faith life – means to be tested. Abraham’s faith did not always survive the test: his faith failed the test in Egypt , failed the test in Gerar, failed the test with Hagar. Untested faith does not yet qualify as faith…

The test is the catalyst in which our response to God, the raw material of faith, is formed into a life of faith. Or not. If the test dissolves whatever we were calling faith into romanticized sludge or pietistic ooze, we are blessedly rid of what will dissipate our life in self-deception.

Abraham left Ur and Haran freely obedient to a command of God, a single-syllable imperative, unsupported, unexplained, unadorned: “Go.” He went in what we might call good faith, that is, without calculation, without suppressed motives, without superstitious fear. He wasn’t enticed; he wasn’t bullied. He was commanded, “Go.” He went. His faith was perfectly adequate to keep him going, but it also required repeated testings along the way. By the time of the Akedah, Abraham’s faith had been tested, and tested, and tested. Sometimes (in Egypt with the Pharaoh, at Gerar with Abimelech, in dealing with Hagar and Ismael) the testings had exposed his so-called faith as no faith at all. But, incrementally, across those miles and through those years, his faith deepened and matured.

The Akedah strikes us as outrageous, the God of promises and covenant acting totally out of character. But maybe not to Abraham. Sacrifice was the motif by which he had lived for years, the letting go, the leaving behind, the travelling light. Faith, repeatedly tested by sacrifice, was a way of life for Abraham. Each sacrifice left him with less of self and more of God. Each sacrifice abandoned something of self on an altar from which he travelled onward with more vision, more promise, more Presence. In the command to leave Ur , Abraham had abandoned his past. He has been learning to do that now for thirty-five years or so, losing nothing in the process. Now he is asked to abandon his future.

By now he has a lived history in which God has provided for him in unanticipated ways. Maybe by now he is used to living trustingly in the seemingly absurd, that which he could not anticipate, that which is beyond his imagining. Maybe he is accustomed by now to the operations of providence. If we arrive at Mount Moriah without having prayerfully and imaginatively participated in the decades of Abraham’s testings, God seems to us to behave outrageously out of character. But not to Abraham. He is now a veteran in the way of faith that is at the same time the way of the faithful God. He is not nearly as surprised as we are. Mount Moriah is the centerpiece of a life of faith that is completed in Jesus, who absorbed the Akedah entire in his Gethsemane prayer, “Not my will but thine…”