Why Would God Ask Abraham to Sacrifice His Son?

Genesis 22 (KJV)

1 And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am.

2 And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

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15 And the angel of the Lord called unto Abraham out of heaven the second time,

16 And said, By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son:

17 That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies;

18 And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice.

We all know the story of the testing of Abraham. In Genesis 22, God instructs Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Is this not human sacrifice? From a Christian perspective, shouldn't this be something that’s abhorrent to God? The idea of killing your own son to please God is startling; horrifying may be a better word to describe it, even though God ultimately doesn't let Abraham go through with it. Why would the Almighty who values human life ask someone to take an innocent life?

In Abraham’s time, human sacrifice was a fairly common practice among the pagans. The idea was that the people would offer a life to the “gods” in thanksgiving or as a way to deflect their wrath, so the concept wouldn’t have been foreign to Abraham when he heard this request.

This test of faith, as rationalized by adherents to Christian ideology, is a bit of a stretch for me to accept as an explanation. The all-loving Almighty Creator of all things that I pray to, alive in all things, would not tempt a man with such a demand as any sort of test of faith. As Abraham is the foundation of all Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - one needs to seriously question who really is the God of their holy books. The Abrahamic God is not the Omnipresent, Omnipotent Source of All That Is in my experience.

The religious texts of all Abrahamic ideologies – all written my men, however inspired – are suspect. When truth comes to light, I believe the God that they bow down to shall be a soon become a stranger that they will have a difficult time reconciling. The God that I pray to does not command me to act in any specific way whatever. The God that I pray to has given me and all others the gift of free will. Therein lies the true test of faith and moral responsibility, not something ordained in holy books from on high.

God is not an old man sitting on a cloud passing judgement on every person's qualifications to receive good or punishment according to how well they have followed some man-made rule. God does not give things, people, jobs, goods, because God consciousness does not have ideas of lack and limitation. God is omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient Consciousness and because everyone is an expression of this one and only Consciousness, everything that IT is, is already fully present within every individual. You are not a part of God, you are the wholeness.

It is not only foolish but fruitless to pray to some concept of God made in man's image to give you things, events, people etc. God is already expressing IT's fullness in and as every person and has no awareness of anything other than ITself because nothing other than ITself exists. If disease, lack, suffering etc. were facets of Divine Consciousness they could never be healed, changed or eliminated because they would be held forever in place by Divine Law. Spiritual evolution is the journey of realizing this and allowing SELF completeness to manifest.