Genesis 22 is the passage people throw down as their trump card against the God of the Old Testament. Here God tells Abraham to take Isaac — the son he waited a lifetime for, the son the promise itself depended on — up a mountain and kill him.

Genesis 22:2 (NKJV)

Then He said, “Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”

Let's just speak of the plain fact before we go any further into this conversation. The simple truth is that it did not happen. God stopped it. The knife never came down. And He did not stop it at the last moment because He had changed His mind, or because Abraham had talked Him out of it. He stopped it because it was never going to happen — because a ram was already caught in a thicket on that mountain, providentially put there by God.

Interestingly, you can also see a glimpse of Abraham's faith that God had a plan in place even before they went up the mountain. He told his young men:

Genesis 22:5 (NKJV)

And Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; the lad and I will go yonder and worship, and we will come back to you.”

Notice what he says: “we will come back.” Not I. This indicates that even Abraham had faith that God could raise up his promised son if necessary.

When Isaac — carrying the wood on his own back (which should tell us something all by itself) — asks his father where the lamb is, Abraham answers:

Genesis 22:8 (NKJV)

And Abraham said, “My son, God will provide for Himself the lamb for a burnt offering.” So the two of them went together.

We would assume that the man climbing that hill was numb, or broken, or blindly obedient. He was none of those things. The New Testament tells us what was going on in the man's mind:

Hebrews 11:17–19 (NKJV)

By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said, “In Isaac your seed shall be called,” concluding that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead, from which he also received him in a figurative sense.

Here was a man holding God's promise in one hand and God's command in the other, unable to see how both could be true — and he trusted God's character enough to conclude that if Isaac died, God would raise him. He obeyed because he believed God would keep His word. He was not a father who had made peace with losing his son. He was a father who had decided God could not lose him.

And at the top of the mountain, God speaks:

Genesis 22:12–13 (NKJV)

And He said, “Do not lay your hand on the lad, or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.” Then Abraham lifted his eyes and looked, and there behind him was a ram caught in a thicket by its horns. So Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up for a burnt offering instead of his son.

Instead of his son. That is the sentence the whole chapter was building up toward, and it is the answer to the question we started with. The nations around Abraham fed their children to their gods. Israel's God stopped the hand of the one man who was willing, and put an animal in the boy's place. And when the Law came, He said it in words no one could soften — the thing the nations did for their gods was the thing He hated, an abomination He never commanded and that never entered His mind (Deuteronomy 12:31; Jeremiah 32:35). God never wanted the boy dead. He wanted a father who would trust Him with the boy, and then He provided the substitute Himself.

Which is why Genesis 22 is not finally about a knife withheld. It is about a substitute given — and about a mountain God was pointing to the whole time.

Centuries later, on a hill in that same country, another Father brought His only Son up the slope, and the Son carried the wood on His own back. That time, no voice called from heaven. No ram was found in the thicket. The knife did not stop, because there was no substitute left to find — the Son was the substitute, and the debt was His to pay.

Romans 8:32 (NKJV)

He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?

God did not spare His own Son so that He could spare us. On Moriah He gave a ram in the place of a boy; at Calvary He gave His Son in the place of His people. So the answer to the question is a firm no — God does not command human sacrifice. Rather, He gave His own incarnate Son as the sacrifice, for the benefit of everyone who will turn from their sin to Him.

The problem of hunger is real in our world today. Millions of children go hungry, many die of malnutrition, and the suffering is exactly as terrible as the critic says. This forms the common accusation that God, if He existed and cared, would not stand by while children starve.

The answer begins with a fact that surprises most people who raise the objection. Child hunger is not caused by a shortage of food. Relief organisations and government agencies consistently report that the world already produces enough to feed every person alive. The problem has never been availability; it is access. Food exists in abundance — it simply does not reach the mouths that need it.

If God had made a world too poor to feed its children, the charge against Him would stand. But He did not. He gave a world with more than enough, and appointed us to manage it — “Then God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it’” (Genesis 1:28). The failure lies in that stewardship, not in the provision. Unjust distribution, economic inequality, corruption, and political strife stand between the food that exists and the children who need it. Behind each of these is a human choice. We hoard what we could share, and mismanage what we were trusted to steward. God is not the author of the greed, indifference, and cruelty that keep food from the hungry; those are our sins, not His design, and it is dishonest to charge Him with the very evils He commands us to end.

None of this makes God distant from the suffering. Scripture presents Him as the particular defender of the vulnerable child. Jesus warned against despising them: “Take heed that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that in heaven their angels always see the face of My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 18:10). A God who assigns heaven's attention to a single child is not indifferent to millions of them. And His care is not merely declared — it is delegated. He has made His people the means by which the hungry are fed: “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). The Church has done this work for centuries, running the hospitals, orphanages, and relief agencies that carry food and care to the poorest places on earth. When the critic asks where God is in the face of child hunger, part of the honest answer is that He is at work in every believer who feeds a hungry child.

So the objection, pressed to the end, turns back on the one who makes it. It assumes God should override human sin by force and feed the children Himself, while overlooking that He has already provided the food, already commanded that it be shared, and already sent His people to share it. The hunger persists because that command is refused — not because God is absent, but because we are disobedient. The right response to the starving child is therefore not to accuse God, but to obey Him.

The Bible teaches two things that seem impossible to hold together. God created everything that exists, and God is perfectly good — “there is no unrighteousness in Him” (Psalm 92:15). Yet evil is undeniably real. If God made everything and God is good, where did evil come from, and is He behind it?

The answer Scripture gives is careful, and it refuses to collapse into either of the easy errors. It will not say that evil somehow escaped God's control, as though something happens in His universe that He did not permit. And it will not say that God is the doer of evil, as though the sin belongs to Him. Both of those would be false. The truth holds two things at once: God ordains everything that comes to pass, including the evil acts of His creatures — and yet God is not the author of sin, because the creatures who commit evil do so freely, from their own desires, and bear the guilt themselves. This is not a modern compromise. It is what the Christian church has confessed for centuries, and it is drawn straight from the way Scripture itself speaks.

The clearest place to see it is the cross. On the day of Pentecost, Peter told the crowd that Jesus was “delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God” — and in the very same breath said that they had taken Him and “by lawless hands have crucified, and put to death” (Acts 2:23). One sentence, both truths. God had ordained the death of His Son before the foundation of the world; the men who carried it out were murderers, acting freely and wickedly, fully answerable for what they did. The worst crime in human history was, at the same moment, the greatest act of God's saving purpose. If those two truths can meet at the cross, they can meet everywhere.

This is why the word “author” has to be handled with care. To call God the author of sin, in the ordinary sense, would mean He is the one who commits it, delights in it, and is guilty of it — and that Scripture flatly denies. God does not sin, tempt anyone to sin, or take pleasure in evil; He is not “tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone” (James 1:13).

What God does is ordain that evil will occur, set its limits, and govern it toward an end He has chosen — without ever being the one who does the wrong. The sin remains entirely the creature's. The purpose behind permitting it is entirely God's. To lose either half is to lose the biblical answer: deny God's control and evil becomes an accident He is helpless to stop; make God the doer and He becomes a sinner. Scripture holds the narrow line between them.

And it insists that God permits no evil pointlessly. He does not merely tolerate it; He overrules it, bending even the worst that men intend toward a good they never imagined. Joseph, sold into slavery by his own brothers, said it to their faces years later: “But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive” (Genesis 50:20). This is the pattern that runs through all of Scripture, reaching its height at Calvary: God takes the evil that creatures freely choose and makes it serve the very good they set themselves against.

So evil is real, and it is grievous, but it is neither outside God's control nor charged to His account. It exists for a season, under His hand, permitted for reasons that will finally display His mercy, His justice, and His glory. The God who governs it is not its author. He is its Master, and one day its end.