Some people are good at getting riddles and others are not. Some people are so literal that they don't even recognize a riddle even when it is staring one in the face. Scripture is always more pregnant with meaning than we understand. God's Word is not a book that can be tamed or stroke our intellectual egos. When it comes to the journey and story of faith, faith is always a mix of belief and unbelief, flesh and spirit, mystic sweetness and messy junk hidden deep inside our lives.
Christians can take a very simplistic reading to this story or try to reinvent it for the modern ears that are scandalized by it. Jews find the hope of atonement and the cry of lament in the Abraham and Isaac story. Skeptics and atheists stumble and can't get the riddle so they abandon the story and move on in their lives. For one person, this is a story of hope and redemption. For another, this is a story of absurdity and moral failure and evil being masqueraded by a god who pretends to be good and just but is neither.
Since nobody died in the story, the question is was God wrong in asking Abraham the question which demanded a response? Can God present us with riddles we don't understand and ask us to do the impossible? Can God ask us questions God already knows the answers to like "Adam, where are you?" Can God ask us questions that say something more about us than they do about God? Jesus at times refused to answer questions and gave answers to questions where he said it was for our benefit and not his in his response.
When Jesus is asked about the divorce question in Matthew 19, his answer is met with unbelief because God told Moses to give permission for divorce. Jesus said God spoke, God commanded, and God permitted not because of any hardness in God's heart but because of the hardness that was within our own hearts.
So once we receive the answer we were not expecting nor even wanting, then we move onto the next question. Why did God send an angel of death to the Egyptians? Why did he drown all those Egyptians? Why did God order Joshua to kill and destroy all the Canaanites? If that is not bad enough, why does God allow all the tyrants and oppressors to continue to rule the world? Why does God act in ways we don't like in killing people and then why doesn't God destroy the very people we think should be killed? We want simplistic answers. Don't speak in parables or riddles. Give us an answer God or whoever the spokesperson is for God.
What we miss is God always invites us back into the story for us to ask the hard questions. God calls each of us like Israel to wrestle with God (which by the way is what the name of Israel literally means, "God-wrestlers"). The bottom line is entering into the wrestling match and to keep digging deeper and keep wrestling. People leave the wrestling match prematurely and often declare themselves the winner. This is not how the wrestling match with the Bible and God works much less how it works in real wrestling today. You keep wrestling till you get an answer or a blessing. Now that is something worth going after!
