Three-agent Universe (8) Abraham

Abraham offering his son Isaac as a sacrifice is an interesting example. When Abraham responded to God's call the spiritual powers of evil knew that something was up, but they did not know what. When Isaac was miraculously born when Abraham and Sarah were old, they knew things were getting serious, but they did not know why. They did not understand what God was doing, but they were desperate to disrupt his plan. Killing Isaac seemed like a good idea. It seems that they did not have the authority to do this themselves, so the next best option was to get Abraham to kill him.

Abraham believed that God told him to offer Isaac as a sacrifice, but he was not trained in spiritual warfare, so I presume that he assumed that every spiritual voice that spoke was the voice of God. If a voice from a spiritual realm spoke to him and told him to do something, he was committed to obeying it. The person who wrote Genesis had a similar understanding of reality.

God did not want Isaac to die because he planned to bless the world through him. We know God's character through the life of Jesus. Jesus did not play games with people to test their faith, so we can assume his father would not do that either. God already knew that Abraham trusted him and was committed to serving him, so he did not need to test his faith. His faith had already been proved by waiting till old age for his son to be born.

I assume the spiritual powers of evil tried to trick Abraham into killing Isaac. Abraham was not walking through paradise in the presence of God. He was actually living on earth in the centre of an intense spiritual battle without any awareness that he was actually engaged in a spiritual struggle for the future of the world. In this environment, he could very easily mistake a demonic power masquerading as an angel of light for the voice of God. Fortunately, God intervened and prevented Abraham from disrupting his plans to sacrifice Isaac.

I describe this event more fully in Abraham and Isaac.