If a father ever killed his own son he would—all things being equal—be rightly judged immoral. But according to Genesis 22, God told Abraham to kill his own son, and was judged righteous for his WILLINGNESS to do so. So God ordains child murder, huh?

Taken at face value this is one of the hardest passages in the Bible, and anyone who flinches is reading it the way the text expects. The question is what kind of story it is, and what it is doing in the book.

1. The Bible bans what this looks like. “You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech” (Leviticus 18:21); a child-sacrificer is listed among the abominations in Deuteronomy 18:10. Jeremiah says the practice is something God “did not command” (Jeremiah 7:31). If Genesis 22 licensed child sacrifice, it would contradict the law and the prophets outright.

2. The text calls it a test. The first verse sets the frame: “God tested Abraham” (Genesis 22:1), and the angel says at the end, “now I know that you fear God” (Genesis 22:12). It is a trial of a man's heart, not a statute for a community, and no one in Scripture ever repeats the act or appeals to it as precedent.

3. Abraham expected a resurrection. He tells his servants, “I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you” (Genesis 22:5), and tells Isaac, “God will provide for himself the lamb” (Genesis 22:8). Hebrews says he reasoned that “God was able even to raise him from the dead” (Hebrews 11:19). He is not resolved to kill; he is resolved to trust.

4. No child actually dies. A ram caught in a thicket is offered instead (Genesis 22:13), and the boy goes home. The premise of the objection — that God ordains child murder — is contradicted by the ending of the very story it cites. Whatever else this narrative is, it is not a story about a dead child.

5. It is an argument against the neighbors' religion. In Canaan, children were burned to appease gods, and the practice recurs in Israel's history. This story says the God of Abraham stops the knife and supplies the substitute himself. Read in its ancient setting, it is a polemic against child sacrifice, not a permission for it.

6. A direct address, not a religious impulse. Abraham acts on an unambiguous divine word, not on his own enthusiasm. Scripture itself tells you to distrust the latter: Deuteronomy 13:1-5 warns against prophets who lead people after other gods, and Deuteronomy 18:20-22 gives a test for failed prophecy. Every modern “God told me” is exactly what those texts are aimed at.

7. Creator and creature are not in the same position. “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away” (Job 1:21). The one who gives life is not a peer of the one who takes it, and the objection's analogy — a human father — assumes the very equality at issue. Concede this is a heavy claim; it only works if God is real and good, which is the thing under dispute, not a trick to slip past it.

8. The objection assumes its own conclusion. Calling God's command unjust presupposes a moral standard above God by which to judge him. If that standard is independent of God, where does it come from and why is it binding on him? If it comes from God's own character, then his commands are not measured by something higher. Either way, the argument needs a premise it has not argued for.

9. The one Son who does die changes the picture. “God will provide for himself the lamb” (Genesis 22:8) becomes, in Paul's reading, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all” (Romans 8:32). In the single case where a son really dies, God is the giver and not the taker. The moral horror the objection feels is the direction the story is pointing, not an accident it stumbled into.

10. This text has disturbed careful readers for millennia. Jewish and Christian interpreters have wrestled with it since before the church existed, and the discomfort is not a failure of faith. It is part of what the passage does: it asks whether God is God and we are not. A text that makes readers uneasy for two thousand years is doing something deliberate.

The story is not a warrant for killing children. It is a story about a God who stops the knife and provides the lamb. If the objection is that the command was unjust, that argument still has to be made on ground it has not yet secured.

Sources: Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster?; William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith; Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.

Related challenges:
• Please check your facts – the biblical account of Noah was derived from the Babylonian myth of Utanapishtim. Your mythical God didn’t 'inspire' it.
• Sorry Christians, but the creation account in Genesis is borrowed -- it is based on the Enuma Elish.
• Christian claims are not credible! Wouldn’t we expect SOME evidence of the exodus from Egypt, if it took place? 2.5 million people wandering around for 40 years in a specific geographic location...and NOTHING!