Q.
110
Why would God ask Abraham to kill his own son?
David J. Lose
Who is...
?
David J. Lose
When I was a kid, my greatest ambition was to be in the
Olympics... in any sport, and as each Olympics comes and
goes, I have to cross off more sports that I’m too old for!A.
There are few harder questions than why God allows tragedy to
strike God’s children. The very presence of suffering, tragedy,
and evil in the world seems to call into question the possibility
of a good and just God. For this reason, theologians and philosophers have,
through the centuries, posited all kinds of explanations. These range from
“suffering and evil are the natural consequence of human freedom” and “cre-
ation is captive to a titanic struggle between God and the devil” on one end of
the spectrum to “evil is punishment for sin” and “suffering provides the train-
ing ground for the soul” on the other.
While most such theories—the technical term is theodicy—may have
something that commends them, none answers the question and problem of
evil satisfactorily.
This helps to explain why these stories are in the Bible. Stories like Abra-
ham and Isaac or Job and his calamities provided the biblical authors with the
means by which to pose and struggle with questions about suffering and evil,
just as more contemporary stories like Crime and Punishment or, more recently,
The Shack allow us to do the same.
This means that if you take the biblical stories about suffering as objective
descriptions of God, you miss their point entirely. Rather, they represent the
faithful attempts of the authors to make sense of suffering on their own terms.
While we may not always agree with their diagnosis of the cause of suf-
fering (a test of fi delity for both Abraham and Job), we may fi nd some com-
fort in their conclusions: God will provide what is necessary (Abraham), and
suffering—and the righteous anger against God it may cause—cannot remove
one from relationship with God (Job).