The series closes with Dennison facing the sheer strangeness of God commanding what amounts to a pagan ritual and abomination: child sacrifice. The story’s purpose, he argues, is to push us past the law itself to the truth beneath it. Our bond with God is finally rooted in his love, not merely his commands.
How can God command Abraham to do the very thing (child sacrifice) that he elsewhere forbids? Dennison wrestles with the dilemma and finds its resolution in Abraham’s remarkable serenity, a faith that makes him, in that moment, more like God himself.
Abraham and Isaac become, for Dennison, a picture of Christ’s own passive and active obedience. The shocking command to sacrifice a son should not, in the end, shock us, he argues, and he draws a pointed line from ancient child sacrifice to modern disregard for unborn life. All of it stands against the backdrop of God’s own sacrificial love.
Isaac’s near-sacrifice in Genesis 22 is more than a test of Abraham’s obedience. Dennison reads it as a prophecy of Christ, with father and son standing as figures for who we are before God, and finds in Abraham’s willingness to give up the son he loved something of God’s own character. True faith, on this reading, means giving up what we love most for God’s sake.
