Anyone who reads the Bible from cover to cover will encounter passages that deeply disturb — anyone, at least, who’s paying attention. And the more seriously one takes the Bible, the more disturbing these passages can be.

I was reminded of this recently when an earnest believer, a mother of young children, shared something with me that had been troubling her for some time. Recalling the Genesis 22 account of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, she was haunted by this unsettling question: If God could command Abraham to do such a shocking, brutal thing in order to test his faith, couldn’t God command me to do the same?

It’s a good question, especially from a Christian who takes the Bible seriously as God’s inspired, inerrant word. Of course, this mother is far from the first to be troubled by God’s command to Abraham, even if most don’t voice it for fear of sounding crazy. But it’s not a crazy question. Since God once commanded a parent to take his child’s life with his own hand, why should we assume he wouldn’t do that again? That question deserves an answer.

So, for the sake of others who have been similarly troubled, and to help us all consider carefully how to approach disturbing accounts in Scripture, I’ll share with you the three reasons I gave to this concerned mother for why the Abraham-Isaac event was unique and unrepeatable.

Historical-Cultural Uniqueness

Looking at the whole of Scripture, it’s important to notice that when God communicates to humans, he does so within their historical-cultural context, their recognizable frame of reference. This is true even when he communicates things they don’t yet understand. So in that light, let’s try to consider God’s command to Abraham within Abraham’s recognizable historical-cultural frame of reference:

After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” (Genesis 22:1–2)

Foreign Frame of Reference

To our twenty-first-century ears, this sounds horribly strange. Of course it does! Unlike Abraham, our beliefs and values, the frames of reference we tend to take for granted, haven’t been forged in the Bronze Age cultures of the ancient Near East.

What’s crucial to remember is that when God called Abraham in Mesopotamia, the only religious framework he would have known was shaped by the prevailing Near Eastern pagan beliefs and rituals. Nearly everyone in this region believed their gods sometimes required human sacrifices to prove worshipers’ devotion or to grant some great request. They took this for granted just as we take for granted that human sacrifice is morally abhorrent. If you and I lived back then, we likely would have assumed human sacrifice was sometimes necessary.

Now, I’m not advocating moral relativism. I’m not saying the human sacrifices of Abraham’s day weren’t truly abhorrent (they were). Nor am I saying that God’s command to Abraham implies that God condoned such sacrifices back then (he didn’t — and I’ll explain why in a moment). I’m saying that when Abraham heard God’s command, he heard it through historical-cultural filters very different from ours. Up to this point, Abraham likely took for granted, as everyone around him did, that the Deity he worshiped might require a human sacrifice.

When Everything Changed

So, in faith that “the Judge of all the earth [would] do what is just” (Genesis 18:25), that God would not break his covenant promise regarding Isaac, even if it meant raising his slain, lamblike son from the dead (Hebrews 11:17–19), Abraham made the agonizing journey to Mount Moriah and, in obedience to God’s dreadful command, took hold of the knife. Then he received the most blessed shock of his blessed life:

The angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. (Genesis 22:11–13)

That was the moment when everything changed. God intervened to stop a human sacrifice and provided a substitutionary sacrifice instead. This inaugurated such a massive paradigm shift that the Hebrew tribes became unique among their Near Eastern neighbors in not engaging in human sacrifice — except during periods when pagan syncretism infected and defiled their worship, which God abhorred and repeatedly condemned (2 Kings 16:1–3; Psalm 106:35–38; Jeremiah 19:4–6).

So, viewing the event on Mount Moriah through a historical-cultural lens, we can see why it was unique and not to be repeated. Through God’s disturbing command to Abraham — one Abraham would have culturally recognized — God was orchestrating an abrupt and dramatic sacrificial paradigm change: the God of the Hebrews doesn’t require his worshipers to sacrifice their children but provides for them substitutionary sacrifices acceptable to him. This paradigm change was so revolutionary that now, four thousand years later, most people around the world view human sacrifice as morally abhorrent.

Typological Uniqueness

Another crucial thing to notice from Scripture is that after the Abraham-Isaac event, God never again made such a demand — not of Abraham or any of his biological or spiritual descendants. Two significant reasons for this also highlight the event’s historical uniqueness.

“Jesus was the sacrifice to end all sacrifices.”

First, as the person God chose to be the founder of this new faith, Abraham was called to embody and exemplify the type of faith that pleases God: a faith in God’s faithfulness to keep his covenant promises despite circumstances that appear contrary (see Romans 4; Galatians 3; Hebrews 11:8–10).

Second, when God provided a substitute sacrifice for Isaac, he intended it to be a typological foreshadowing of God’s salvific plan in Christ: God himself would provide the ultimate and consummate sacrifice of his only Son “once for all” (see Hebrews 7–10). Abraham appears to have prophetically spoken beyond his understanding when, in reply to Isaac’s question about the sacrifice, he said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son” (Genesis 22:8).

Theological Uniqueness

This brings us to the third reason the Abraham-Isaac event was unique, the ultimate reason we need not fear God demanding of us a ritual sacrifice of any kind, human or animal: Jesus was the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. As “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), Jesus was the ultimate and final sacrifice God provided. And unlike Isaac, Jesus was sacrificed voluntarily. He said,

I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father. (John 10:17–18)

Since now “we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10), God neither demands nor desires any further ritual sacrifices (Hebrews 10:5–6).

That’s the theological significance of why, in God’s providence, he ultimately removed the Jerusalem temple in AD 70, ending its sacrificial system, and has since made it essentially impossible to reinstate because of the mosque on the Mount. And that’s why, as the influence of Christianity has spread around the globe, the vast majority of people have come to view ritual human sacrifice as morally abhorrent — and even animal sacrifice is increasingly rare.

Think and Pray Together

The Bible contains plenty of disturbing content. It demands a lot of hard thinking from its serious readers.

But none of us is so wise and educated that we can figure it all out on our own. Each of us is too limited and too weak and has too many blind spots. That’s why God gave the Bible to his church. He wants us to think hard and wrestle together — which is why I’m grateful for the dear saint who was willing to ask me this difficult, tender question, allowing me to share a few insights, most of which I have gleaned from others who in turn have gleaned from others.

The Abraham-Isaac event in Genesis 22 is understandably disturbing, especially to twenty-first-century Western readers so far removed from the time and culture in which it occurred. It can seem like God put a man through an unnecessarily cruel ordeal just to test his faith. It can also leave us wondering if he might do the same to us.

But seeing that there’s so much more to this story than first meets the modern eye has encouraged me to beware of presuming too much when reading other unsettling biblical accounts that appear to cast a suspicious light on God’s character. It reminds me that the path to understanding often involves prayerfully questioning my own assumptions, prayerfully putting in the hard work of thinking, and prayerfully seeking help from other saints, past and present, who have done the same.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back on this Friday. Pastor John, back in June of 2021, here on the podcast, you gave us a personal update. And at the very end of that update, like a little footnote, you briefly mentioned that you were about to head off for a two-month writing leave to write a whole book about 2 Timothy 4:8 on the second coming of Christ. That was back in APJ 1641. In God’s kindness, the book you alluded to there got written, edited, and published, and is now out under the title Come, Lord Jesus: Meditations on the Second Coming of Christ (Crossway, 2023). We’re going to look at that book over the next week or so on the podcast in four episodes of questions that I have for you.

First off, in this new book, what becomes pretty obvious to any reader is that you don’t spend too much time dwelling on wrong views of the end times. Your goal really was to clarify what actually happens when Christ returns and to celebrate it and encourage us to love his appearing. That’s the main theme of the book. But I wonder if you would be willing to take ten minutes or so on this episode to sketch for us some of the misconceptions — the blunders and the urban legends — about the second coming that you hope your book will help people to avoid in the future.

In general, I do think it’s right that we do the most good for the church with regard to the second coming when we don’t focus on distortions and misconceptions, but rather on the truth and the beauty of what it really is in the Bible. And yet, it’s right, now and then, to make our people understand there are misconceptions; there are errors.

Five Misconceptions

Frankly, I’m really happy that my book is viewed as being mainly proactive and positive rather than critical. But of course, even that positive view can be overstated. If we never focus on what’s wrong and show how harmful it is, we won’t really be biblical, because the biblical witness itself describes errors and their harmfulness — like Jesus did with the scribes and Pharisees or like Paul in exposing errors of false teaching in Colossians and other places.

So yes, I am willing to point out some misconceptions about the second coming. Let’s just take them one at a time, and I’ll try to explain why I think they’re a problem.

1. Christ will come after a golden age of Christendom.

First, I would mention the view that the second coming of Christ is far into the future. It will not happen until the kingdom of God is established as the ruling earthly power, including the Christianization of the cultures and societal structures of the earth. This is usually called postmillennialism, meaning that the second coming happens after (or post) the millennium. And the millennium in that view is understood to be an extended period in this age when the gospel has triumphed in such a way that a golden age of Christendom holds sway around the world and the powers of civil government, for example, are brought into the service of promoting Christian doctrine.

Now, I think this view does not adequately come to terms with both the teaching and the spirit of the New Testament that we are to live with a consciousness of the nearness of the coming of the Lord. I don’t think it comes to terms adequately with the teaching of the New Testament concerning this present age as lying “in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19), or how Paul describes this age till Jesus comes as this “present evil age” (Galatians 1:4), or the statement in Hebrews that “here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14), or how the movement toward the end is described with a movement of greater evil, not less evil (2 Timothy 3:1–5). And practically, I think this view pushes the appearing of the Lord so far out into the distant future that it becomes inconsequential in the daily consciousness of the churches that embrace this view.

“There is no New Testament promise that the church, in this fallen age, will transform any given culture.”

And I think it skews the mission focus of the New Testament away from world evangelization and personal disciple-making and the process of sanctification. It reorients people’s passions onto culture transformation as a foregrounded goal rather than a possible secondary consequence of speaking truth and doing love to the glory of Christ. And the reason I say “a possible secondary consequence” is that the culture is not the report card of the church. There is no New Testament promise that the church, in this fallen age, will transform any given culture. It may. It has. And it may not. It is as likely in any given setting that martyrdom, not transformation, will be the effect of obedience. And when that happens, the church has not failed. Just read the book of Revelation. Martyrdom is not failure.

2. Christ has already come.

Second, there is a view of the second coming that basically says it’s already happened — for example, in the events of AD 70, when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. It’s not a very common view, I admit, but in that view, the descriptions of his coming that sound globally visible and world-shaking and obvious were really just traditional apocalyptic language to say that the Lord comes in historical judgments in this age, and then he carries it out for the rest of the time — namely, his rule over the world through the church, with no expectation of any literal second coming at all.

And I don’t think the language of the New Testament that describes Christ coming can be reduced to symbolic statements of historical events like AD 70. Paul’s understanding of the second coming in 1 Thessalonians 4:13–17 is that it involves the resurrection of all the Christians from the grave. That did not happen in AD 70 or at any time. It’s going to happen when the Lord’s appearing comes.

3. No events need to happen before Christ comes.

Third, I think it’s a mistake to say that there are no events that are yet to happen in history before the Lord comes. Second Thessalonians 2:1–12 describes an apostasy and the appearance of the “man of lawlessness.” And Paul gives these two realities as an answer to the question for those who thought that the day of the Lord was upon them. And he says, “Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction” (2 Thessalonians 2:3).

4. Christ will spare his people from the tribulation.

Fourth, perhaps the most common misconception of the second coming is that it happens, so to speak, in two stages. First, he comes and takes Christians out of the world and returns them to heaven with him while there’s a great tribulation on the earth. And then, after a short time, maybe seven years, he returns with his saints to establish his kingdom.

Now, that’s one misconception I do deal with in the book. I devote a whole chapter to it, in fact. So I’m not going to go into any detail here. It is probably the most common misconception, and people will be surprised. “Whoa, I didn’t know that was a misconception. That’s what I’ve always believed.” I grew up with this view. My dad held this view. I love my dad to death, to the day he died, and we got along just fine. But gradually I came to see that this view did not have the Bible on its side.

I think the primary danger of a view like this is not that it undermines any important doctrine (at least I’m not aware of anybody going off the rails in any fundamental way because they hold this view). But the danger is that it fosters the expectation that God will spare his people from suffering in the latter days. I think that’s a mistake. And it could be a harmful mistake if people lost their faith because suddenly they found themselves enduring end-time hardships that they thought they were going to escape.

“God’s own people experience some of the suffering of judgment, but we don’t experience it as punishment.”

First Peter 4:17 says, “It is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God?” I think he’s showing in that statement that God’s own people, the apple of his eye, experience some of the suffering of judgment, but we don’t experience it as punishment. Christ took our punishment. We experience it as testing, proving, purifying us.

5. Christ will never come.

Finally, I think it’s a mistake to say what the skeptics did in 2 Peter 3:4: “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.” In other words, it’s a serious mistake, Peter says, to think, “Well, it’s just been too long. Everything just goes on. He’s just not coming. It was all a myth.” That is a tragic mistake. And here is Peter’s response: “Do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness” (2 Peter 3:8–9). Wow — what a response.

Love the Lord’s Appearing

So again, Tony, like I said at the beginning, I would much rather spend three hundred pages in a book meditating on the beauty and the power and the wonder of what’s really going to happen when the Lord comes than I would talking about mistakes. So that’s what I tried to do in the book. The aim isn’t mainly to correct errors. It’s mainly to help people love the Lord’s appearing.

Audio Transcript

We go to school to learn. And when it comes to prayer, we sometimes need to be enrolled in the school of prayer — God’s school of prayer. And that school of prayer is described for us in the Old Testament, in a book we don’t go to very often: the book of Zechariah. It is there that we find a key text in John Piper’s understanding of how we learn to pray: Zechariah 13:8–9, a text never mentioned on this podcast — until today. Here he is to explain the importance of this text in a sermon he preached to his church in the final days of 2008, looking ahead to the new year of 2009. Here’s Pastor John.

Okay, Zechariah. Do you know where that book is? Second-from-the-last book of the Old Testament. If you go to the end of the Old Testament and flip back about four pages, you’ll be there. Zechariah 13:8–9, and we’ll wrap it up here with this. What did I get hit with in Zechariah that gave this message the twist it’s now getting on prayer? I don’t think I’d ever seen this before.

Refined by Fire

This is a couple of verses about God’s school of prayer. If you’re not praying the way you should, then probably he’s going to sign you up for this. Let’s start at verse 8: “In the whole land, declares the Lord, two thirds shall be cut off and perish, and one third shall be left alive.” So stop there. Don’t worry about when this happens in history right now. Just leave that one aside. Just look at how God works.

He takes the whole, and two-thirds of them perish. They get wiped out. God saves a third. So you’re in that third if you’re a Christian. Symbolically, you’re in that third. God’s remnant — faithful, imperfect, weak, lousy pray-ers — he saved them.

What’s God’s remedy for their weaknesses? What’s his school of prayer? Verse 9: “And I will put this third into the fire, and refine them as one refines silver, and test them as gold is tested.” Now notice carefully what’s happening, because this is surprising. In his great love, he rescues them from the whole and he includes them in his elect third (symbolically third). He’s got a third, and he loves them. He saved them. He didn’t let them perish. And then he takes his loved ones, his cherished, the apples of his eye, and he puts them in the fire.

“God rescues us from the flames of hell and puts us into refining flames.”

Why? Now, this is normal Christianity. Do you think, “Well, that’s the Old Testament; he doesn’t do that anymore”? Listen to 1 Peter 4:12: “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.” That’s crystal clear. This is normal, not strange, Christianity. God rescues us from hell and puts us in fire. Got that? That is normal Christianity. God rescues us from the flames of hell and puts us into refining flames. Why?

School of Earnest Prayer

Now I don’t want all the answers from all over the Bible. I just want the answer from verse 9 — and it’s crystal clear, and it’s simple, and narrow, and small, and big, and huge, and glorious. It’s about prayer. So let’s finish reading verse 9: “I will . . . test them as gold is tested. They will call upon my name, and I will answer them.” That’s all. Nothing about getting their sex lives burned clean, nothing about getting their money mismanagement burned clean, nothing about getting their power struggles and relational mess-ups fixed. Just this: “Then they’ll call on me, and I’ll answer.”

God puts us in the fire to awaken earnest prayer. This is a plea now. I’m pleading with you. This verse is in the Bible to help this plea that I’m about to make to you come true. I can’t make it come true. This verse — by God’s grace, with his power — can make this come true. I plead with you not to be among the number who gets sent to this school, which is designed to awaken prayer, and the school becomes the very reason you abandon prayer.

“God puts us in the fire to awaken earnest prayer.”

Thousands go to this school and turn on prayer. “If he treats me like this, I’m not going to ask him for anything, because I asked him to keep me out of this, and he didn’t do it.” The very school designed to produce depth, trust, and God-focused, man-diminishing, worshipful prayer is turned on its head, and the school is hated. I’m pleading with you: this verse is in the Bible to help that not happen. That’s why it’s here, so that when you look around you, and the flames are burning, and you wonder, “God, what’s up?” — this is up. This is up. Don’t teach him how to teach. Submit.

Enfeebled by Prosperity

Let me close with a quote from John Calvin. I read Calvin on this text, because next year is his five hundredth birthday, so I’m poking in Calvin a lot these days. This is what he said, and it’s more true today than it was when he wrote it: “It is therefore necessary that we should be subject from first to last to the scourges of God [the fire] in order that we may, from the heart, call on him, for our hearts are enfeebled by prosperity, so that we cannot make an effort to pray.”

If that’s not the American church, I don’t know what is. We are enfeebled by prosperity so that we can scarcely make the effort to pray, because so many other good things, prosperous things, right things, fill our powerless lives.

So would you resolve with me that this simply will not happen to you in 2009 — “this” meaning that our hearts are enfeebled by prosperity so that we cannot make the effort to pray? Would you resolve with me that that’s not going to happen? I’m not going to let that happen, whatever it takes. I’m not going to be enfeebled by my prosperity. I will put in place whatever it takes.

May the Lord be gentle with us in the fires of 2009, because they will come. I hope you don’t turn on him when they come.