Does God command human sacrifice?

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.