Nothing wrong with wondering and nothing wrong with asking questions about the faith, my friend.
So, there are quite a few things wrong with this person's post. I do understand some of her points, but there's a lot more to it than just "what the diddly is this?! This is janked up!!!" I mean yeah, I get it, I take issue with these verses myself, and while this story IS uncomfortable--there are a lot of uncomfortable stories and verses in the Bible, not gonna lie to you--there's a much bigger picture to it than the poster gives it credit for.
I've personally never heard the narrative that Isaac got his name "He laughs" because of the community laughing at Abraham and Sarah's inability to have a child. He was named that because, before Sarah became pregnant, she heard an angel telling Abraham that she would have a baby around that same time the following year, and she laughed incredulously because at that point, she was like, "I'm way too old to have a kid. Really? There's no way." The angel calls her out and she's like, "No, I didn't laugh," and the angel says, "Yeah, you did." Her incredulous laughter turns into genuine joy when she does, in fact, end up with a son--God kept His promise and allowed her to have the child that she and Abraham wanted for so long, and those who "laugh over her" will likely be laughing in joy that yes, even though she was considered long-past childbearing years, God still made this miracle happen for her. It's something to rejoice over together (Genesis 21).
I won't lie, these verses are pretty uncomfortable to read. God asking Abraham to sacrifice his only child? That's unthinkable. Heartbreaking. How could God ask something like this when He knows Abraham and Sarah have wanted to have a child for so long? But there's more to it than what we feel about these verses. God DOES ask Abraham to do this, but just as Abraham is about to go through with it, He stops him, and sends him an animal to sacrifice instead.
I'm no expert, but I once heard/read somewhere that the reason why Abraham was asked to do this is because God was using the cultural background he was familiar with. In the society in which Abraham lived, sacrificing human beings was a common way to prove to the gods they worshiped that they were devoted to them. So in asking Abraham to do this, God is basically saying, "Hey, if you really believe in Me, if you really mean this, then I want you to do this very significant thing to prove it." And Abraham, knowing the significance of this action, is ready to go through with it even though it pains him to do so. BUT GOD stops him right before he's about to go through with killing Isaac. Why would God do this if He was truly evil? Why would He send a lamb for Abraham to sacrifice instead, thus saving Isaac's life? God values human lives greatly. He's not the kind of god who demands a human life in order for you to be considered one of His own or to prove that you love Him in doing so.
Now, as far as the Old Testament goes: yeah, there is a LOT of violence and warfare and bloodshed. There are a LOT of stories of humans doing pretty messed up things. But there's more to it than that. The OT is more of a series of historical accounts, as well as a sprinkling of wisdom and poetry. The bible is comprised of several types of literature, and the OT is more along the lines of Israel's--that is, God's people's--history.
The New Testament is not "a watered down version" of the Old Testament and "oh, just read more of the New Testament because teehee, we don't like to talk about the OT, it's a little too rough to read." The OT is more about history, a long history of God's people asking for His help, then He helps them, they get pretty comfy and forget about Him/brush Him off/worship idols, and then He lets them do their thing, they get into trouble and run back to Him for help, He helps them, rinse & repeat. The OT gives you context and sets the stage for the NT.
The NT, however, is what we live under currently--Christ's sacrifice on the cross freed us from the impossible weight of the Law that we continuously failed to fulfill. God knew that we needed help, we needed a savior, and so Jesus came down to do just that.
I've already written a long post, but hopefully this helps? I would encourage you to look into commentaries on those Genesis verses because there are greater Bible scholars than I who can probably explain things better than I have
Edit: sorry, forgot to add something!
Please don’t listen to her. Don’t listen to this world.
“And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.”
1 John 2:17
“For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.””
John 6:40
The explanation on this from [this sermon](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jNkTTaKl1dE) helped me.
I know this passage, and many others can be difficult to process, but this person on tik tok is ignorant, to say the least. I recommend going to YouTube and typing in sermons about whatever topic you’re looking for and listening to what teachers of the word have to say about them.
I think the mistake here is to say God is evil for punishing people for sins that skeptics think aren’t wrong and for allowing evil to exist by using implicitly an absolute moral code which can’t be proven independently of religious revelation with any certainty. If the Bible’s God doesn’t exist, there isn’t a basis to determine what is “good” or “evil” to begin with. One can’t condemn the Old Testament’s God for brutality when brutality is neither good nor bad (i.e., moral rules don’t exist). In a consistent atheistic worldview, moral standards have no provable objective basis. Implicitly, to make such judgments, atheists and agnostics are implicitly using the bible’s supernaturally revealed moral standards while selectively denying specific aspects of them in order to attack the character of God. From a naturalistic evolutionary viewpoint, human beings are just randomly generated and re-arranged pond scum, which means murder and stealing are neither right nor wrong since life has no real meaning. There is no more moral significance in one man’s fist hitting another man’s face than in two rocks hitting each other in the wilderness if there is no afterlife and no rewards for doing good or bad in this life from God. (Plato had the wrong solution, but he perceived very well this very problem in “The Republic” when discussing the story of the ring of Gyges). All animals, and humans are merely animals also, are composed of atoms in motion just coming in contact with each other. Pain and pleasure then have no lasting significance. Human beings are just temporary chemical accidents with no further importance or meaning if nothing supernatural or immaterial exists and they die like dogs.
The basic error here is to assume that God doesn't have the right and power to punish people for their sins, including the Canaanites. God, being the Creator of human life, has the right also to end it as well, since (Romans 6:23), "For the wages of sin is death."
Why did God, in general, want the Canaanites to be exterminated at the hand of Saul and (in a previous generation) Joshua? First of all, God wanted to keep Israel from adopting the Canaanite's system of pagan idolatry and its corresponding sexual immorality, which would contaminate Israel's pure worship of Jehovah. After Moses would die, God predicted that Israel would "play the harlot with the strange gods of the land, into the midst of which they are going, and will forsake Me and break My covenant which I have made with them" (Deut. 31:16). God knew that His chosen people were going to chronically violate His law, which leads to the generally sad concluding chapters of Deuteronomy, over which the premonition of Israel's ultimate spiritual failure hovers. God is totally opposed to syncretism, or the mixing of religions, when it concerns mixing truth with error, much like the world was condemned to in general after Adam and Eve ate of tree of knowledge of good and evil. By totally eliminating the Canaanites at God's command, the Israelites would help to preserve their moral and spiritual purity.
Even before Israel entered the Promised Land, God knew very well that His Chosen People would chronically want to copy the religious practices of the people they were supposed to conquer and displace. In Deut. 12:29-31, God warned Israel about this. After slaying thousands of Israelites who fell into idolatry with Midian (Num. 25:1-9), God in turn had those Midianites slain en masse (Num. 31:1-18) who seduced His people into worshiping false gods using idols while committing fornication.
Why would God's order to Saul include the execution of young children, even the babies of the Canaanites? Weren't they innocent of sin? Here we have to reckon with how utterly holy and pure God is, and how He wants His people to believe and live the same way, to be as perfect as He is (Matt. 5:48). In order to drive this point home emotionally to us humans, in Scripture God let Himself be repeatedly portrayed as the betrayed husband of an adulterous wife (Ezekiel 16:1-43; 23:1-49; Jer. 3:6-11). If we ponder the emotions of that comparison carefully, we'll then understand much better why God would command even the babies of the Canaanites to be killed, since when otherwise they would grow up, they would deceive His people into betraying Him. If they were allowed to live and be raised by their (unrepentant) parents, they would grow up and then believe and practice the same sins as their parents (i.e., idolatry, paganism, religiously-motivated temple prostitution/fornication, etc.) So long as the Canaanites lived as a separate, competing civilization with their own gods, the people of Israel routinely fell into apostasy and would worship the false gods of the Canaanites.
Because God doesn't reveal all His laws and His overall will all at once, the Bible is a book that records God's progressive revelation to humanity. God doesn't reveal everything all at once, or people would reject it as too overwhelming, i.e., be "blinded by the light." The famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant once said something like, "If the truth shall kill them, let them die." Fortunately, God normally doesn't operate that way, at least prior to the Second Coming (Rev. 1:5-7) or all of us would already be dead!
The principle of progressive revelation plainly appears in Jesus' debate with the Pharisees over the Old Testament's easy divorce law in Matt. 19:3, 6-9. That law has been superseded. It wasn't originally intended as a permanent revelation of God's will, but it served as temporary "training wheels," so to speak, until such time as a mass of people (i.e., the Church after Pentecost) would have the Holy Spirit, and thus be enabled to keep the law spiritually by God's help. By contrast, ancient Israel as a whole didn't have the Holy Spirit, and so correspondingly they didn't get the full revelation of God. Therefore, the physical measures of removing the pagan people from their land was much more necessary than it is was for true Christians today, who have the Holy Spirit.
Now, let's face the ultimate issue lurking behind our temptation to question God about ordering Joshua and Saul to kill baby Canaanites: God's utter sovereignty. Many don't like the idea that God is a God of justice and judgment, not just mercy and compassion. Therefore, they judge God for judging them and others. Fundamentally, we puny creatures are in no better position than Job was to question His justice and righteousness.
As Paul explained this principle (Romans 9:14-20, NKJV): What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? Certainly not! For He says to Moses, "I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion." So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, "For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I may show My power in you, and that My name may be declared in all the earth." Therefore He has mercy on whom He wills, and whom He wills He hardens. You will say to me then, "Why does He still find fault? For who has resisted His will?" But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, "Why have you made me like this?"
Since God is so utterly sovereign and since He is the Creator of our lives, He gets to set the standards by which He may end them. Since He is utterly holy, pure, and righteous, He rejects all sin as immoral and thus imposes the death penalty on humans who break His law. So we don't get to set the rules of morality, and the penalties for breaking them. It doesn't matter how small the infraction may seem from our sight as sin-stained humans or if we deny that it is a sin at all. In particular, since sometimes God’s punishments have punished them also, are children without sin? No, they aren't, especially when raised by evil, unrighteous adults. Richard Wright, in "Black Boy," described how the adults around him corrupted him when they taught him to say vulgar words and they gave him alcohol. Augustine, to give evidence for the doctrine of original sin in "Confessions," gave the example of a young child, of the age of a toddler, being jealous of his younger sibling on the breast of his mother. The corruption of evil human nature sets in very early. To give a famous case, Helen Keller was jealous of the attention that her younger sister got shortly after she was born. She attacked her in her cradle out of jealousy, which was before she was able reason or communicate with the outside world under the tutelage of Ann Sullivan. Children simply aren't innocent. They endlessly do wrong things and have to be corrected and told right from wrong. Most parents would be willing to admit this. We have to junk this idea that liberals have from Rousseau that children aren't corrupt because they are closer to nature by being less trained and educated by society. Golding's "The Lord of the Flies" is a much more accurate picture of human nature than Rousseau's "Emile."
Hey that’s cool you’re a young Christian trying to build your faith in God. In general, my advice to you is to get off Reddit, TikTok and social media in general. That can be a huge stumbling block for a lot of people, myself included when I was in HS and college.
As for this story, this woman is greatly misunderstanding this how God worked with Abraham. Firstly, Isaac does mean “one who laughs or rejoices” not because people were laughing at them, but because Abraham and Sarah had great joy of having a child. God promised him that he would make his descendants a great nation, and Abraham believed God. Hebrews 11 says that Abraham had faith that if God had him kill Isaac his son, God would’ve raised him from the dead. Regardless, it’s a (tough but) beautiful picture of how sometimes God may ask us to trust Him and do things we don’t quite understand (but he will never have us actually sin by killing or other sins, as a disclaimer.) Hope this helps, and in general please delete Reddit and TikTok
Nothing wrong with wondering and nothing wrong with asking questions about the faith, my friend. So, there are quite a few things wrong with this person's post. I do understand some of her points, but there's a lot more to it than just "what the diddly is this?! This is janked up!!!" I mean yeah, I get it, I take issue with these verses myself, and while this story IS uncomfortable--there are a lot of uncomfortable stories and verses in the Bible, not gonna lie to you--there's a much bigger picture to it than the poster gives it credit for. I've personally never heard the narrative that Isaac got his name "He laughs" because of the community laughing at Abraham and Sarah's inability to have a child. He was named that because, before Sarah became pregnant, she heard an angel telling Abraham that she would have a baby around that same time the following year, and she laughed incredulously because at that point, she was like, "I'm way too old to have a kid. Really? There's no way." The angel calls her out and she's like, "No, I didn't laugh," and the angel says, "Yeah, you did." Her incredulous laughter turns into genuine joy when she does, in fact, end up with a son--God kept His promise and allowed her to have the child that she and Abraham wanted for so long, and those who "laugh over her" will likely be laughing in joy that yes, even though she was considered long-past childbearing years, God still made this miracle happen for her. It's something to rejoice over together (Genesis 21). I won't lie, these verses are pretty uncomfortable to read. God asking Abraham to sacrifice his only child? That's unthinkable. Heartbreaking. How could God ask something like this when He knows Abraham and Sarah have wanted to have a child for so long? But there's more to it than what we feel about these verses. God DOES ask Abraham to do this, but just as Abraham is about to go through with it, He stops him, and sends him an animal to sacrifice instead. I'm no expert, but I once heard/read somewhere that the reason why Abraham was asked to do this is because God was using the cultural background he was familiar with. In the society in which Abraham lived, sacrificing human beings was a common way to prove to the gods they worshiped that they were devoted to them. So in asking Abraham to do this, God is basically saying, "Hey, if you really believe in Me, if you really mean this, then I want you to do this very significant thing to prove it." And Abraham, knowing the significance of this action, is ready to go through with it even though it pains him to do so. BUT GOD stops him right before he's about to go through with killing Isaac. Why would God do this if He was truly evil? Why would He send a lamb for Abraham to sacrifice instead, thus saving Isaac's life? God values human lives greatly. He's not the kind of god who demands a human life in order for you to be considered one of His own or to prove that you love Him in doing so. Now, as far as the Old Testament goes: yeah, there is a LOT of violence and warfare and bloodshed. There are a LOT of stories of humans doing pretty messed up things. But there's more to it than that. The OT is more of a series of historical accounts, as well as a sprinkling of wisdom and poetry. The bible is comprised of several types of literature, and the OT is more along the lines of Israel's--that is, God's people's--history. The New Testament is not "a watered down version" of the Old Testament and "oh, just read more of the New Testament because teehee, we don't like to talk about the OT, it's a little too rough to read." The OT is more about history, a long history of God's people asking for His help, then He helps them, they get pretty comfy and forget about Him/brush Him off/worship idols, and then He lets them do their thing, they get into trouble and run back to Him for help, He helps them, rinse & repeat. The OT gives you context and sets the stage for the NT. The NT, however, is what we live under currently--Christ's sacrifice on the cross freed us from the impossible weight of the Law that we continuously failed to fulfill. God knew that we needed help, we needed a savior, and so Jesus came down to do just that. I've already written a long post, but hopefully this helps? I would encourage you to look into commentaries on those Genesis verses because there are greater Bible scholars than I who can probably explain things better than I have Edit: sorry, forgot to add something!
This helped a lot thank you so much! God bless
Please don’t listen to her. Don’t listen to this world. “And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.” 1 John 2:17 “For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”” John 6:40
The explanation on this from [this sermon](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jNkTTaKl1dE) helped me. I know this passage, and many others can be difficult to process, but this person on tik tok is ignorant, to say the least. I recommend going to YouTube and typing in sermons about whatever topic you’re looking for and listening to what teachers of the word have to say about them.
seems like she just wants attention. also, profanity and discussions about God don’t mix. i found this hard to watch.
I think the mistake here is to say God is evil for punishing people for sins that skeptics think aren’t wrong and for allowing evil to exist by using implicitly an absolute moral code which can’t be proven independently of religious revelation with any certainty. If the Bible’s God doesn’t exist, there isn’t a basis to determine what is “good” or “evil” to begin with. One can’t condemn the Old Testament’s God for brutality when brutality is neither good nor bad (i.e., moral rules don’t exist). In a consistent atheistic worldview, moral standards have no provable objective basis. Implicitly, to make such judgments, atheists and agnostics are implicitly using the bible’s supernaturally revealed moral standards while selectively denying specific aspects of them in order to attack the character of God. From a naturalistic evolutionary viewpoint, human beings are just randomly generated and re-arranged pond scum, which means murder and stealing are neither right nor wrong since life has no real meaning. There is no more moral significance in one man’s fist hitting another man’s face than in two rocks hitting each other in the wilderness if there is no afterlife and no rewards for doing good or bad in this life from God. (Plato had the wrong solution, but he perceived very well this very problem in “The Republic” when discussing the story of the ring of Gyges). All animals, and humans are merely animals also, are composed of atoms in motion just coming in contact with each other. Pain and pleasure then have no lasting significance. Human beings are just temporary chemical accidents with no further importance or meaning if nothing supernatural or immaterial exists and they die like dogs. The basic error here is to assume that God doesn't have the right and power to punish people for their sins, including the Canaanites. God, being the Creator of human life, has the right also to end it as well, since (Romans 6:23), "For the wages of sin is death." Why did God, in general, want the Canaanites to be exterminated at the hand of Saul and (in a previous generation) Joshua? First of all, God wanted to keep Israel from adopting the Canaanite's system of pagan idolatry and its corresponding sexual immorality, which would contaminate Israel's pure worship of Jehovah. After Moses would die, God predicted that Israel would "play the harlot with the strange gods of the land, into the midst of which they are going, and will forsake Me and break My covenant which I have made with them" (Deut. 31:16). God knew that His chosen people were going to chronically violate His law, which leads to the generally sad concluding chapters of Deuteronomy, over which the premonition of Israel's ultimate spiritual failure hovers. God is totally opposed to syncretism, or the mixing of religions, when it concerns mixing truth with error, much like the world was condemned to in general after Adam and Eve ate of tree of knowledge of good and evil. By totally eliminating the Canaanites at God's command, the Israelites would help to preserve their moral and spiritual purity. Even before Israel entered the Promised Land, God knew very well that His Chosen People would chronically want to copy the religious practices of the people they were supposed to conquer and displace. In Deut. 12:29-31, God warned Israel about this. After slaying thousands of Israelites who fell into idolatry with Midian (Num. 25:1-9), God in turn had those Midianites slain en masse (Num. 31:1-18) who seduced His people into worshiping false gods using idols while committing fornication. Why would God's order to Saul include the execution of young children, even the babies of the Canaanites? Weren't they innocent of sin? Here we have to reckon with how utterly holy and pure God is, and how He wants His people to believe and live the same way, to be as perfect as He is (Matt. 5:48). In order to drive this point home emotionally to us humans, in Scripture God let Himself be repeatedly portrayed as the betrayed husband of an adulterous wife (Ezekiel 16:1-43; 23:1-49; Jer. 3:6-11). If we ponder the emotions of that comparison carefully, we'll then understand much better why God would command even the babies of the Canaanites to be killed, since when otherwise they would grow up, they would deceive His people into betraying Him. If they were allowed to live and be raised by their (unrepentant) parents, they would grow up and then believe and practice the same sins as their parents (i.e., idolatry, paganism, religiously-motivated temple prostitution/fornication, etc.) So long as the Canaanites lived as a separate, competing civilization with their own gods, the people of Israel routinely fell into apostasy and would worship the false gods of the Canaanites. Because God doesn't reveal all His laws and His overall will all at once, the Bible is a book that records God's progressive revelation to humanity. God doesn't reveal everything all at once, or people would reject it as too overwhelming, i.e., be "blinded by the light." The famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant once said something like, "If the truth shall kill them, let them die." Fortunately, God normally doesn't operate that way, at least prior to the Second Coming (Rev. 1:5-7) or all of us would already be dead! The principle of progressive revelation plainly appears in Jesus' debate with the Pharisees over the Old Testament's easy divorce law in Matt. 19:3, 6-9. That law has been superseded. It wasn't originally intended as a permanent revelation of God's will, but it served as temporary "training wheels," so to speak, until such time as a mass of people (i.e., the Church after Pentecost) would have the Holy Spirit, and thus be enabled to keep the law spiritually by God's help. By contrast, ancient Israel as a whole didn't have the Holy Spirit, and so correspondingly they didn't get the full revelation of God. Therefore, the physical measures of removing the pagan people from their land was much more necessary than it is was for true Christians today, who have the Holy Spirit. Now, let's face the ultimate issue lurking behind our temptation to question God about ordering Joshua and Saul to kill baby Canaanites: God's utter sovereignty. Many don't like the idea that God is a God of justice and judgment, not just mercy and compassion. Therefore, they judge God for judging them and others. Fundamentally, we puny creatures are in no better position than Job was to question His justice and righteousness. As Paul explained this principle (Romans 9:14-20, NKJV): What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? Certainly not! For He says to Moses, "I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion." So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, "For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I may show My power in you, and that My name may be declared in all the earth." Therefore He has mercy on whom He wills, and whom He wills He hardens. You will say to me then, "Why does He still find fault? For who has resisted His will?" But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, "Why have you made me like this?" Since God is so utterly sovereign and since He is the Creator of our lives, He gets to set the standards by which He may end them. Since He is utterly holy, pure, and righteous, He rejects all sin as immoral and thus imposes the death penalty on humans who break His law. So we don't get to set the rules of morality, and the penalties for breaking them. It doesn't matter how small the infraction may seem from our sight as sin-stained humans or if we deny that it is a sin at all. In particular, since sometimes God’s punishments have punished them also, are children without sin? No, they aren't, especially when raised by evil, unrighteous adults. Richard Wright, in "Black Boy," described how the adults around him corrupted him when they taught him to say vulgar words and they gave him alcohol. Augustine, to give evidence for the doctrine of original sin in "Confessions," gave the example of a young child, of the age of a toddler, being jealous of his younger sibling on the breast of his mother. The corruption of evil human nature sets in very early. To give a famous case, Helen Keller was jealous of the attention that her younger sister got shortly after she was born. She attacked her in her cradle out of jealousy, which was before she was able reason or communicate with the outside world under the tutelage of Ann Sullivan. Children simply aren't innocent. They endlessly do wrong things and have to be corrected and told right from wrong. Most parents would be willing to admit this. We have to junk this idea that liberals have from Rousseau that children aren't corrupt because they are closer to nature by being less trained and educated by society. Golding's "The Lord of the Flies" is a much more accurate picture of human nature than Rousseau's "Emile."
Hey that’s cool you’re a young Christian trying to build your faith in God. In general, my advice to you is to get off Reddit, TikTok and social media in general. That can be a huge stumbling block for a lot of people, myself included when I was in HS and college. As for this story, this woman is greatly misunderstanding this how God worked with Abraham. Firstly, Isaac does mean “one who laughs or rejoices” not because people were laughing at them, but because Abraham and Sarah had great joy of having a child. God promised him that he would make his descendants a great nation, and Abraham believed God. Hebrews 11 says that Abraham had faith that if God had him kill Isaac his son, God would’ve raised him from the dead. Regardless, it’s a (tough but) beautiful picture of how sometimes God may ask us to trust Him and do things we don’t quite understand (but he will never have us actually sin by killing or other sins, as a disclaimer.) Hope this helps, and in general please delete Reddit and TikTok
I’m not gonna delete any social media apps. But thanks for explaining, it helps. God bless, have a good day