Opening A Can of Worms

For a few weeks now I’ve been writing about a couple of issues raised by a pastor friend of mine regarding Genesis 22. In the last post, which you can find here, I was addressing the issue of this statement by God to Abraham in v. 12: “now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” This is a bit of a problem if we think God is omniscient. If he knows everything, including what will happen in the future, how did he not know beforehand that Abraham feared God?

I responded by saying that this is a figurative way of speaking in which God is described as truly interacting with Abraham’s demonstration of faith even though he knew ahead of time what Abraham would do. He has full knowledge but he is still responding truly to Abraham.

The question I raised for this post is: how do we know to take just this part of the statement (now I know) as figurative? 
Continue reading…

Today I got this question from a pastor friend in an email and I thought I’d post my response here. Maybe someone has a reaction…

Part of the question comes from him, part from his son. Today I’ll give my response to the son’s question and next week (I hope) to the pastor’s.
Continue reading…