When Faith Fractures Relationship

The Cost of Mistaking Fear for God

Multiple views of Sacrificio de Isaac by Alonso Berruguete

I haven’t taken my eyes off of him. The lids of my eyes weighted with two days of hard travel and pending grief, but I dare not close them. I can’t. I want to remember my son like this—at peace. I want to burn this memory deep into my heart in hopes that I can access it when the nightmares come.

And they will come.

How could they not?

Do the gods ever tire of firstborns? What kind of god asks a father to become his son’s executioner?

I stare at this gift…my son. My promise. Your promise, God.

His shoulder rises and falls with each breath. These shoulders where my hands rested on many an evening as we watched the sun set behind the rock hills of the Negev. The wind combs through his hair, lifting tufts of it from his face—the moonlight tracing his features one final time.

He has my nose, strong and pronounced and his mother’s gentle eyes. His mother…with the mere thought of her my body heaves with shame and sorrow. What will you have me tell her, God?! What message might I bring her that might possibly comfort her after her beautiful boy is taken by my own hand and your will? She won’t even have the dignity of giving our son a proper burial, one last way to care for our boy. Why consume his body with fire, when you’ll already have his spirit?

What reason could you possibly have? I can think of none. I have trusted you since the day you called me out of Ur. I have heard your promises of fathering a great nation. I have seen your faithfulness in providing me an heir, but I’ve also seen your wrath as sulphur and fire fell from the sky turning Sodom and Gomorrah into a smoldering wasteland. You told me it was “because you had heard the outcry” that their cruelty must be punished.

Tell me, God…will you hear my outcry tomorrow? If so, who will hold you to account for the cruelty you ask me to visit upon my own blood? My very heart…

I will do what you require of me, but don’t mistake the source of my devotion.

I love my son, but I fear you.

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Step back with me for a moment. This story is sacred. And like all sacred stories, it’s rooted in the real.

Sometimes we forget that the Biblical text centers real human experiences. This isn’t C.S Lewis and these stories don’t take place in some far off land called Narnia. The backdrop for the biblical narrative is this rock we call earth.

It features humans who are both hopeful and afraid—doing the best they can with what understanding they have. While cultural narratives and traditions change over the years, people are still people. Mothers and fathers love their children. And for the better part of human history these humans have tried to honor and please the God of their understanding.

For the western christian tradition most of our understanding comes from The Bible. But so does most of our misunderstanding.

When we treat Genesis 1–3 like a historical report, it’s easy to assume the God of the Bible is the only deity humanity has ever known. That the story begins with a blank page and Yahweh writing the first word.

But what if Genesis isn’t the origin story we think it is?
What if it’s a second draft—a bold, subversive retelling?
What if these opening lines are telling us something revolutionary about the God of Israel because they assume we know the gods that came before?

A New God, but an Old Imagination

In Chapter 12 of Genesis, the God of Bible calls Abram to “go out from you country, your relatives, and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”

Everything about this story is fresh. This God invites, but doesn’t demand. This God makes covenants, gives promises and asks little in return but to trust. This God doesn’t come with an accompanying scroll or text. All Abram has is God’s promise and the experience that comes with this journey.

So what does Abram do?

He listens. He trusts, but even then there are gaps in what he understands about God.
So, he does what we all do:

He fills in the gaps with what he knows of the gods of he inherited.

And the gods of Canaan were brutal.

Abram—now Abraham, because who doesn’t love a good rebrand—had lived in Canaan for 25 years when his son Isaac was born. He may have walked with his God, but he was surrounded by the religious practices for another.

Molech.

While Abraham was slowly learning to trust a relational God, he was living in a land where Molech’s name was spoken with reverence—and fear. In Canaan, child sacrifice was part of life. Fear-driven rituals defined your devotion. Offering up your firstborn was as holy as it was horrific.

Twenty-five years is a long time to watch your neighbors burn their children and call it worship—long enough for even a faithful man to wonder if that’s what gods eventually require.

A Story That Reflects as Much as it Reveals

A quick youtube search will put a buffet of sermons at your finger tips around this story. Surprisingly, there were more than a few animated versions for children (and we wonder why people are leaving our churches in droves). At a glance the common theme for the messages revolve around two big ideas: Testing Your Faith and God’s Provision. Sadly, both of those leave God looking more like Molech than the God revealed through the person of Jesus.

A quick Sunday school reading of the passage reveals a man so committed to the Lord that he’d give his only son.

So noble.

So brave.

Some even suggest this as a foreshadowing for what Jesus will endure at the hand of his own father (big yikes with a shout out to my reformed friends). We speak of a God who in his mercy calls the whole thing off at the last minute and provides a ram instead and everyone lives happily ever after.

But they don’t. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Genesis 22:19 says, “So Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beersheba. And Abraham lived in Beersheba.” There’s no mention of Isaac. In fact, we don’t see Isaac again until chapter 23 when Abraham’s servant is given instructions on finding Isaac a wife. Isaac is living in Beer-lahai-roi…that’s not Beersheeba. The only time we see Abraham and Isaac together again in scripture is when Isaac and Ishmael put Abraham’s body in a cave after he’s died.

It’s a safe interpretation to say that while Isaac didn’t die on the alter that day, his relationship with his father did.

And Sarah? She died in Hebron, 26 miles north of Beersheba where Abraham lived, and scripture tells us in Genesis Chapter 23:2 , “Abraham went in to mourn for Sarah and weep for her.” They weren’t living together at the time of her death.

This single act of “obedience” costs Abraham his son and his wife, but at least God kept his promise. What does that say about God? If you’re thinking “God’s ways are not our ways” I ask you to really sit in this for a minute. What happened to this family should be mourned in every church in America. An estranged kid cuts off ties to his father. A wife leaves her husband out of rage, or a husband leaves his wife out of shame. No reconciliation. No future. A family shattered.

When trust is broken, moreover, when relationship is broken in the name of a loving God, the fallout echos through generations to come. When those you counted on to walk with you choose not to, because the one you believed could make all things new told them not to…that’s a literal hell.

If God is good, and I believe God is, then we should take offense to the way this story has been hijacked to promote an insecure God that is happy to sacrifice relationships and families on the alter of obedience. The fact that this narrative is widely accepted should serve as a red flag that we’ve become far to accepting of a theology rooted in fear, watered with certainty and branded as “biblical truth.”

We have to return to the sacred work of questioning the text—not to dismantle it, but to let it do what it was always meant to do: reveal the heart of God and expose the fear we’ve mistaken for faith.

Wrestling is Worship

If the Binding of Isaac leaves you disturbed, uncertain, or even angry—you’re not alone. You’re also not unfaithful. You’re in good company with centuries of Jewish thinkers, poets, rabbis, and mystics who didn’t explain the story away—they wrestled with it. And in their tradition, that wasn’t disrespect. That was worship.

This practice is called Midrash.

Midrash is a way of reading the Hebrew Scriptures that treats the text like the living thing it is—full of gaps, silences, shadows, and breath. It assumes that if God is infinite, then the stories that reveal God must have infinite depth. The goal wasn’t to win a debate or prove a doctrine. The goal was to collectively see God and ourselves more clearly.

Midrash is what happens when the community gathers together, looks into a story, and asks, “What do you see?”
Someone says, “I see pain.”
Another says, “I see mercy.”
Someone else says, “I see myself.”
And instead of correcting each other, they nod their heads in agreement and say, “Yes. And also…”

Many of these Midrashim—that’s the what you call a collection of these discussions— were recorded and passed down to us. Here’s a handful of Midrashim on the Binding of Isaac:

1. God never meant for Isaac to die.

(Midrash Tanchuma, compiled around the 5th–8th century CE)
In this Midrash, God says to Abraham:

“I never said to slaughter him. I said to ‘bring him up.’”
In other words, Abraham misunderstood the heart of God—because he was still filtering God’s voice through the gods of his culture.

2. Sarah dies from heartbreak.

(Genesis Rabbah 58:5, compiled around the 5th century CE in Palestine)
One Midrash teaches that when Sarah hears what Abraham intended to do to their son, the shock is too much—her heart gives out. She dies in Hebron, miles away from Abraham, because she couldn’t bear the grief. This reads nothing like a triumphant story about a faithful family who passed the test. It reads like a family who was decimated by it.

3. Isaac never speaks to his father again.

(Various Midrashim and later medieval commentaries (9th–12th century CE)
Isaac becomes estranged. He doesn’t walk back down the mountain with Abraham. He doesn’t speak to him again in the text. Some Midrashim suggest Isaac left, spiritually or physically, and was never the same.
One later commentary even says angels had to come and heal him because he died on the alter, not from a knife, but from fear.

We can imagine the pain, the confusion, the anger, and grief a son would carry like a scar for the rest of his days after such an ordeal. Bad ideas about God can ruin otherwise good and faithful people…and the people they love the most.

Midrash doesn’t look for clean answers. It offers space—for the ache, for the wonder, for the possibility that God is still speaking in the gaps. It moves in and beyond cultural moments and invites us to question. And maybe that’s the point.

If Scripture is a living story, then faith means learning how to hear God’s voice again and again—not just repeating what others assumed in fear. But fear is loud. It tells us we need to be obedient for God to be pleased…even if it means someone has to be sacrificed.

That’s the danger of bad theology. It doesn’t look evil—it looks obedient. It get rewarded. It can even produce a fruit that passes the eye test, but is bitter to those who are forced to eat from it’s tree.

We rarely eat the fruit from our own tree. It’s our families, our neighbors, our children, and people we’ll never meet that are forced to choke down the rancid fruit our unquestioned faith produces.

Modern Alters

The tension in Genesis 22 is not whether or not Abraham obeys—it’s about whether or not Abraham can discern the voice of Yahweh from the cultural background noise of Molech. When you live long enough in a culture of sacrifice and scapegoats, you stop questioning whether the altar should exist—you simply comply because fear tells you if you don’t you’ll be the next in line for god’s wrath.

But that’s not the God of the biblical text. This God meets us in our misunderstanding and nudges us towards a better revelation. God’s command to “not lay a hand on the boy” isn’t a last minute pardon. It’s a divine intervention that reveals that this God is nothing like the gods of Canaan. But we…well, we’re still a lot like Abraham.

We too struggle to discern the voice of God from the voice of Molech.

When we demand sacrifice to prove devotion…

When our worship is rooted in fear…

When our “peace” requires the death of another image bearer…

When we seek control through fear and intimidation…

When our actions tear families apart…

When our faith demands we fracture relationship…

We worship Molech and call it “Truth.”

But Holy Love offered a ram that day, and later it’s own body on a cross to satisfy our blood lust and fear. We can choose better “good news.” We can choose a better love.

A Love that already proved it’s devotion on a cross—forgiving the worst humanity had to offer without a single sign of human repentance…

A Love rooted in relationship…

A Love that makes peace through nonviolence…

A Love that protects life…

A Love that restores families…

A Love that enters our pain to restore our well-being…

A Love that reveals the God of mercy. A God of liberation.

A God nothing at all like Molech.

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A Lifetime of Regret

A leisurely scroll through your favorite social media app (provided your preferred flavor of faith has been properly assimilated into your algorithm) and you’ll likely find one flavor of christianity telling another flavor they “aren’t real christians.” Honestly, I get it. Hell, I catch myself saying it, but I’ve gotten pretty good at not posting it—you know what they say about people who live in glass houses.

I do wonder though if Abraham should be labeled as “not a real… whatever you would have called him”. Let’s be fair, Judaism wasn’t established yet. I think he was doing the best he could with what he had. But the fear was simply stronger than the love he understood. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting God’s love was no match for the fear of Molech. What I believe the story suggests is that Abraham’s understanding of God’s love was no match for Abraham’s fear of disobeying God.

The thing that wrecks me is how much time he ended up with to reflect on the consequences of that misunderstanding. With no Sarah, no Ishmail, and no Isaac in his life I’m certain his mind went back to that moment every day and as a husband, a father, and someone who deeply loves God, I imagine he was wrecked with regret.

And maybe that’s why this story exists as it is. A warning to future generations that when it comes to choosing between obeying God, and severing relationships, the price of not questioning the text— is relationship itself.

Here’s what I haven’t mentioned, and the part that should shake us to our core. Ten out of the fifty chapters in Genesis are dedicated to this very personal, intimate, and covenantal relationship forming between God and Abraham. That’s 20 percent of Genesis! They speak to each other, travel together, they negotiate together. This was unlike any God before. This was special.

But when Abraham caught the wrong idea about God in chapter 22, everything about his relationship with this God changed too. Scholars suggest Abraham lived another 50-75 years after the binding of Isaac, yet there’s not another conversation between God and his faithful servant recorded in all of scripture.

Abraham’s wrong ideas about God also cost him intimacy with God. The chasm between them wasn’t God’s rejection or disappointment, because that’s not the God revealed in the text, but rather Abraham’s fear that locked him in to a narrative that God required sacrifice—that God valued obedience, at whatever cost, over relationship.

Now, you might be confused, and rightfully so, if you recall a messenger of God telling Abraham “Good job! Now I know you fear the Lord.” There’s midrash for that too, but for the sake of brevity I’ll say only this. The goodness of God meets us at the intersection of God’s love and our limited understanding. Abraham is affirmed for trying to do what he thought was right, but it’s less of an “atta-boy” and more of “you tried your best.” Even in our most erroneous acts, perfect love requires no shame.

I don’t know if Molech is a spirit, a demon, or just a name ancient people gave their shadow-selves, but I do know this. The fruit that Molech produces, one that kills relationships, is not of God.

This means that when we choose to love the sinner but hate the sin, to sever relationship with our LGBTQIA+ youth, or worse kick them out of the house because that’s what we believe God requires, we are following the voice of fear, not of love.

When we separate families, uproot communities, and target undocumented workers in the name of national security, we are following the voice of fear, not of love.

When we assign the label “terrorist” to an entire nationality while selling weapons used to bomb hospitals to allies, we are no different than Abraham who followed the god of his misunderstanding without questioning until it literally cost him everything—including the relationship with the God he did understand.

Does God test us? I believe so, but not in the way we think. God isn’t the one baiting us with wrong answers, ready to spring a trap of judgement when we bite. That’s Molech. Our God embedded the right answers in our very beings. These answers ask us to protect union first and foremost. We believe in a triune God, but I think we are also a part of God’s triune community.

When Jesus instructs us to love God, and love our neighbor as ourself, there are three components, God, neighbor, and self. This too is a holy union and anytime this is fractured, harm ensues. This fracture of is the mother of all suffering.

Maybe the real test was never about Isaac. Maybe it was about Abraham learning to tell the difference between God and fear. Between trust and terror. Between covenant and cruelty.

If God never asked for Isaac to be sacrificed, and we’ve built an entire theology around obeying a voice that wasn’t God’s—we must learn to hear the whisper again:

Do not lay a hand on the child.

Not the queer child.

Not the foreign child.

Not the undocumented child.

These are my children.

Do no harm.

Not in God’s name.

Not ever again.

✌🏼🧡

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