Thursday, August 17, 2017

Isaac: The World's First Child Sacrifice

The Devil is often found in Scripture attempting to imitate God. However, the imitation game he plays is to distort and twist the truth and character of God into some profane form of idolatry among men. In fact, even in his five famous “I will” statements, he proclaims to make himself “…like the Most High.[1] This is because he has no other reference point. What he himself attributes to Deity is only what has been revealed to him. There is no knowledge Satan possesses which did not first originate in the Godhead.

As we read through the book of Genesis, it is easy to miss some of the "firsts" in human history. For example, when God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his only son, the promised son, up until that point there had never been a human offering. There was no such thing as child sacrifice. It did not exist. The sacrificing of human lives did not come into the mind and heart of man for another few hundred years. (This is according academic sites.)

The promised son Isaac was born in 1851 B.C. God more than likely commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son at age twelve which would bring us to 1839 B.C. By looking through both Biblical and archaeological records, you will find no evidence of child sacrifices anywhere in the world until after this event on Mount Moriah. Certain civilizations and tribal groups which flourished in the Americas such as the Aztecs, Mayans, Olmecs, Toltecs and Incas did not come into these practices of human sacrifices until sometime after 1500 B.C.

There is also no record of child sacrifices in the Bible until the time Moses records the Law on Mount Sinai in 1445 B.C. The command is found in Leviticus 20:1-5 which begins by saying,

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, “Say to the people of Israel, Any one of the people of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn in Israel who gives any of his children to Molech shall surely be put to death. The people of the land shall stone him with stones…
The reason you do not find child sacrifice in Genesis is because it did not exist. The reason God was not giving Abraham the land of the Canaanites at that moment in Genesis 15:13-16 is because one of the sins God would later judge them for (i.e. child sacrificing) was not a practice. The Canaanites had not yet fallen into this depraved form of idolatry.

This then gave Satan well over three hundred years to begin deceiving mankind into thinking that they could appease their gods by slaughtering their children. Although we know that Isaac was not physically sacrificed on that altar, the Devil took that godly test of obedience and turned it into a vicious and evil attack on mankind which eventually ran rampant through civilizations all across the world.




[1] ESV; Isa. 14:14, p. 578

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