God's demand of Abraham

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God told Abraham to sacrifice his son as a test of faith. Abraham was prepared to do so until God told him to stop. Now, we know that if someone today ever thought that God told them to kill someone, they would be obliged to reject the authenticity of that “message.” It would be absurd.

On a biblical level, we know that God doesn’t contradict himself, and that he has commanded us not to kill, and so for that reason alone we could say that it would not be God asking us to kill anyone. However, we also know that people have a right to live via our faculty of reason. That is to say, through our knowledge of Natural Law.

While the commandments did not exist at the time of Abraham, Natural Law certainly did. If Abraham had been a genius and figured all that out for himself, would he have been wrong to say to God, “I’m sorry God, but I cannot act in contradiction of the Reason you have given me.”? If Abraham would have been within his rights to say as much to God, would it be useful to speculate on God’s reaction?
 
Binary said:
God told Abraham to sacrifice his son as a test of faith. Abraham was prepared to do so until God told him to stop. Now, we know that if someone today ever thought that God told them to kill someone, they would be obliged to reject the authenticity of that “message.” It would be absurd.

On a biblical level, we know that God doesn’t contradict himself, and that he has commanded us not to kill, and so for that reason alone we could say that it would not be God asking us to kill anyone. However, we also know that people have a right to live via our faculty of reason. That is to say, through our knowledge of Natural Law.

While the commandments did not exist at the time of Abraham, Natural Law certainly did. If Abraham had been a genius and figured all that out for himself, would he have been wrong to say to God, “I’m sorry God, but I cannot act in contradiction of the Reason you have given me.”? If Abraham would have been within his rights to say as much to God, would it be useful to speculate on God’s reaction?
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Quite so.
The church is often a market, and the market has its institutions within certain local Churches.
Icannot see any resolution to this painful biblical episode that denies Natural Law. And becuase of that I see the market-place, and the devil ,as much within certain churches as within certain passages of the Bible.
And of course, if Abraham lived today, he would be sectioned or locked up. That is not a thumbs up to psychiatry, however, which has its own devils, amd much more of them.
 
I’m sorry Jones, I don’t understand your comparison of the Church to a market. At a guess, I’d say you’re either implying that the discerning Christian has to pick and choose what they want from the Church, OR (and I hope that this is the case) you’re making an obtuse reference to bacon, because for some reason that’s the first word that pops into my head when I hear the word market. Really, if you could just frame your whole argument in the context of some kind cooked pork, I think we’d reach an agreement pretty quickly.
 
Binary said:
God told Abraham to sacrifice his son as a test of faith. Abraham was prepared to do so until God told him to stop. Now, we know that if someone today ever thought that God told them to kill someone, they would be obliged to reject the authenticity of that “message.” It would be absurd.

On a biblical level, we know that God doesn’t contradict himself, and that he has commanded us not to kill, and so for that reason alone we could say that it would not be God asking us to kill anyone. However, we also know that people have a right to live via our faculty of reason. That is to say, through our knowledge of Natural Law.

While the commandments did not exist at the time of Abraham, Natural Law certainly did. If Abraham had been a genius and figured all that out for himself, would he have been wrong to say to God, “I’m sorry God, but I cannot act in contradiction of the Reason you have given me.”? If Abraham would have been within his rights to say as much to God, would it be useful to speculate on God’s reaction?
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Great question!

Here is a discussion which recently took place on this forum: forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=563375

And here is Scott Hahn’s discussion (click on “Beloved Sons”): salvationhistory.com/studies/lesson/covenant_our_father_abraham#Beloved
 
Today’s philosophical errors cannot judge correctly the nature of union with God. When we see Abraham as “thinking” this command by God to sacrifice Issac, we are in error and this is related to Aquinas’ “the object known is in the knower”, seen today in the dispute of “how we know”. When the deeper union with God is spiritual, not merely at the level of the intellect, it is a level of reality so far exceeding the thought process, that one knows prior to and without actual thought. This is the same as Aquinas described in the nature of the Beatific Vision
Therefore if anyone in seeing God conceives something in his mind, this is not God but one of God’s effects.
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Preceding any of this in us is the desire to please God, to do the will of God, and to attain the life of God in us that makes us adoptive children of God. The natural law being the law written on our hearts is also prior to deliberation. It is enumerated and made explicit in the 10 Commandments which orient us to our last end, our perfection in God which breaking this law, known as sin, separates us from. (Catholic theology is not about a covering with the Merits of Jesus over our sins, which leaves us lost in sin interiorly, it is an interior change based on grace which unites us to God through Jesus because of His Sacrifice). It is the beginning of the Evangelical Law seen in the Sermon on the Mount which calls us to be holy as God is Holy, because we have His Life in us, which perfects us if we accept it.

This end, this perfection, if we do not care about it, will lead us to final perdition. If someone does not care about hell, then he certainly does not care about using God as a justification for doing evil, “God told me to”. It is up to us to get our judgments right or we risk sinning and we risk doing that which is opposed to God and we thus risk hell itself. To say that God can not tell us to do things that are considered wrong but are absolutely within the right for God to do and command is to disavow the Bible and God’s Sovereignty. One must be sure it is God and this is up to the person to get right or risk hell by sinning, but people today don’t care about justifying murderous acts and certainly don’t use God in this anyway.

Since Issac is a prefigurement of the Sacrifice of Jesus, we should know that this prefigurement cannot happen again, and we should know the tenants of the Evangelical Law which is perfection and the application of this law is virtue and just judgment concerning our neighbor. It is the very life of God in His Grace that is a greater virtue than the Old Testament prefigurements so that now perfection is the Will of God for us, not Abrahamic type sacrifice. Our test of faith today is in getting correct our path to union with God through study, virtue, and loving God and neighbor.
 
Binary said:
God told Abraham to sacrifice his son as a test of faith. Abraham was prepared to do so until God told him to stop. Now, we know that if someone today ever thought that God told them to kill someone, they would be obliged to reject the authenticity of that “message.” It would be absurd.

On a biblical level, we know that God doesn’t contradict himself, and that he has commanded us not to kill, and so for that reason alone we could say that it would not be God asking us to kill anyone. However, we also know that people have a right to live via our faculty of reason. That is to say, through our knowledge of Natural Law.

While the commandments did not exist at the time of Abraham, Natural Law certainly did. If Abraham had been a genius and figured all that out for himself, would he have been wrong to say to God, “I’m sorry God, but I cannot act in contradiction of the Reason you have given me.”? If Abraham would have been within his rights to say as much to God, would it be useful to speculate on God’s reaction?
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I had this Question on my mind recently. I sometimes think the living God speaks to my heart and mind. But it is really all in the Mind!! God speaking to you via your subconcious mind speaking back to you as you talk to God about Things in life. I thought how did Abraham really know it was God talking to him when he asked him to sacrafice his only Son Issac.
I dont Trust my communication with God at that level. If God said to me today to sacrafice my only loving Cat to prove you really Love me:eek: I don’t think i could go through with it.

Mind you recently in the Past some christians who claim God talks to them have blown up Abortion Clincs and killed certaian doctors because the believe and say God told them to do this.
 
Earnest_Bunbury said:
Today’s philosophical errors cannot judge correctly the nature of union with God. When we see Abraham as “thinking” this command by God to sacrifice Issac, we are in error and this is related to Aquinas’ “the object known is in the knower”, seen today in the dispute of “how we know”. When the deeper union with God is spiritual, not merely at the level of the intellect, it is a level of reality so far exceeding the thought process, that one knows prior to and without actual thought. This is the same as Aquinas described in the nature of the Beatific Vision

Preceding any of this in us is the desire to please God, to do the will of God, and to attain the life of God in us that makes us adoptive children of God. The natural law being the law written on our hearts is also prior to deliberation. It is enumerated and made explicit in the 10 Commandments which orient us to our last end, our perfection in God which breaking this law, known as sin, separates us from. (Catholic theology is not about a covering with the Merits of Jesus over our sins, which leaves us lost in sin interiorly, it is an interior change based on grace which unites us to God through Jesus because of His Sacrifice). It is the beginning of the Evangelical Law seen in the Sermon on the Mount which calls us to be holy as God is Holy, because we have His Life in us, which perfects us if we accept it.

This end, this perfection, if we do not care about it, will lead us to final perdition. If someone does not care about hell, then he certainly does not care about using God as a justification for doing evil, “God told me to”. It is up to us to get our judgments right or we risk sinning and we risk doing that which is opposed to God and we thus risk hell itself. To say that God can not tell us to do things that are considered wrong but are absolutely within the right for God to do and command is to disavow the Bible and God’s Sovereignty. One must be sure it is God and this is up to the person to get right or risk hell by sinning, but people today don’t care about justifying murderous acts and certainly don’t use God in this anyway.

Since Issac is a prefigurement of the Sacrifice of Jesus, we should know that this prefigurement cannot happen again, and we should know the tenants of the Evangelical Law which is perfection and the application of this law is virtue and just judgment concerning our neighbor. It is the very life of God in His Grace that is a greater virtue than the Old Testament prefigurements so that now perfection is the Will of God for us, not Abrahamic type sacrifice. Our test of faith today is in getting correct our path to union with God through study, virtue, and loving God and neighbor.
Click to expand...
I wonder how God will Judge those Christians in the past dark ages who were part of the Spanish Inquisition of the Church. These christians believed they had the right in the name of God to torture and kill people by burning them at the stake for being Heretics. Did God tell them to do this??

In my eyes these christians were really murderers of people who did not share the same beliefs of Doctrine as them.
 
Peter Drucker wrote about the problem of Abraham in The Unfashionable Kierkegaard. I think he expressed it well:

In my favorite among Kierkegaard’s books, a little volume called Fear and
Trembling, he raises the question: What distinguished Abraham’s willingness to
sacrifice his son, Isaac, from ordinary murder? If Abraham had never intended
to go through with the sacrifice, but had intended al the time only to make a
show os his obedience to God, then Abraham, indeed, would not have been a
murderer, but he would have been something more despicable: a fraud and a
cheat. If he had not loved Isaac but had been indifferent, he would have been
willing to be a murderer. Yet Abraham was a holy man; God’s command was for
him an absolute command to be executed without reservation; and we are told
that he loved Isaac more than himself. The answer is that Abraham had faith.
He believed that in God the impossible would become possible - and he could
carry out God’s command and yet retain Isaac.
 
Binary said:
God told Abraham to sacrifice his son as a test of faith. Abraham was prepared to do so until God told him to stop. Now, we know that if someone today ever thought that God told them to kill someone, they would be obliged to reject the authenticity of that “message.” It would be absurd.

On a biblical level, we know that God doesn’t contradict himself, and that he has commanded us not to kill, and so for that reason alone we could say that it would not be God asking us to kill anyone. However, we also know that people have a right to live via our faculty of reason. That is to say, through our knowledge of Natural Law.

While the commandments did not exist at the time of Abraham, Natural Law certainly did. If Abraham had been a genius and figured all that out for himself, would he have been wrong to say to God, “I’m sorry God, but I cannot act in contradiction of the Reason you have given me.”? If Abraham would have been within his rights to say as much to God, would it be useful to speculate on God’s reaction?
Click to expand...
Abraham would have been fully justified in rejecting the notion that God had commanded him to kill his son but it never occurred to him that he might be mistaken! He **believed **God had commanded him to sacrifice Isaac but God would never ask a father to murder his own son. The fact that Abraham was prevented from committing a terrible crime proves that it was never God’s Will. Nor would God **deceive **Abraham into believing it was His Will simply to test his faith.

The moral is that we should have faith but also heed our conscience. Many atrocities have been - and still are - committed in the name of religion…
 
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