- Part 1: The Gospel of Adam, Abel, Abraham and Jesus
- Part 2: The Forbidden Fruit, and the Gift of Sorrow
- Part 3: Two Brothers, Two Sacrifices, and The Strategic Lie
VI. Abraham’s World
Abraham’s family was from Ur, an ancient Sumerian city with many pagan gods. Bloodthirsty and cruel, they demanded not only animal sacrifice, but also the sacrifice of innocent men and women. At the death of some royalty, dozens of servants and handmaidens would be slaughtered, their skulls violently pierced with a sharp tool, their corpses then undergoing a crude form of mummification, so they could join their masters in death, thus participating in an elaborate ceremony of passage to the underworld.[1]
One of the mightiest gods of Ur was Ea, also known as Enki.[2] According to ancient Sumerian religion, Enki is source of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, and is the god who first created men out of clay. Enki was often represented with the head of a ram.[3]
After leaving Ur, Abraham lived for a while in Canaan, but when a famine hit, he and his wife Sarah fled to Egypt.[4]
The Egyptians worshiped a number of ram headed gods, including Heryshaf[5] and Amun.[6] One of their most ancient[7] and most dominant gods was Khnum, a ram-headed[8] god who was thought to be the source of the Nile river, and the source of the soil’s fertility. He was also considered the source of human fertility. It was believed that he put clay on his potter’s wheel and created the bodies and souls of children, also providing health to the children after they were born.
Enki and Khnum were similar to one another:
- Both gods were thought to be the sources of great rivers, bringing life to the crops.
- Both gods supposedly created men from clay.
- Both gods were often represented with the head of a ram.
Shepherds were an abomination to the Egyptians[9], and the sacrifice of a lamb or ram was exceedingly offensive to them.[10] It was considered sacrilegous—a great insult to their gods, and thus an insult to the Egyptian people themselves.[11] Anyone making such a sacrifice was decisively cutting ties with the religion of Egypt.
The ancient serpent had succeded in crafting a human society in utter defiance to the worship of the one true God. The Egyptians were:
- Worshiping demons instead of God[12]
- Offering blood sacrifices to these “gods”, not out of love, but out of fear.
- Imagining that a ram-headed demon is the source of water and fertility.
- Giving this ram-headed demon credit for creating man from the clay, and for granting health to children
Abraham, like Abel, was a shepherd.[13] The Egyptians, like Cain, were farmers.[14] By despising shepherds, they were despising the memory of Abel. By deifying the ram, and by cursing those who sacrifice rams and lambs, they were implying that Abel’s sacrifice, rather than Cain’s, was impure.[15]
God had called Abraham out of Ur[16], and God had called Abraham out of Egypt[17], to dwell in the land of Canaan, and to become the father of those who would know the one true God, worshiping Him in spirit and in truth. For this to happen, God had to utterly wean Abraham and his descendants from the demonic gods of the Sumerians and Egyptians. The time was coming when these ram-headed gods would be exposed, rejected, and judged.
VII. Abraham’s Sacrifice
Abraham’s family had been raised for many generations in a world where the “gods” demanded bloody sacrifices. An animal sacrifice was thought good, and a human sacrifice was considered even better.[18] There seemed no better way to show devotion to a god, than to slay one’s own child as a sacrificial offering.
God desired Abraham’s love and devotion.
But God did not desire human sacrifice.
So God executed a plan to teach Abraham both of these lessons, in a powerful and memorable way. God told Abraham to do the very thing that God did not desire—to go to a distant mountain and offer his son as a sacrificial burnt offering.
Abraham had great love and devotion for God. And having been raised in the land of Ur, it may have seemed reasonable that human sacrifice was the ultimate way to show one’s complete devotion to a deity. However, when he resolved to obey God and offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice, his decision was quite different from anyone who practiced child sacrifice in the surrounding pagan nations. The major differences are these:
- When a pagan offered such a sacrifice, he believed that his child would die, and that he would never see him again. He was saying goodbye forever.
- Such pagans had received no specific promises from God, that their child would live a long, successful life afterwards.
Abraham was in an entirely different situation. God had promised Abraham that his son Isaac would become a father himself, and the ancestor of a great multitude. Abraham believed God, and God accounted it to him as righteousness.[19]
Abraham believed that God was telling the truth, and that meant one of two things had to happen. Either God would stop him from completing the sacrifice, and not let him go through with it, or else God would allow the sacrifice to take place, and then God would raise Isaac from the dead and restore him to good health.[20] Either way, there would not be any permanent “goodbye”, and no harm would come to Isaac’s good future.[21] Because Abraham believed God’s words could be trusted, his outlook on this particular sacrifice was completely different from the outlook held by his pagan neighbors.
Indeed, God did not allow Abraham to go through with this sacrifice. Once it was clear that Abraham was fully devoted to God, and completely obedient to His command, God stopped Abraham, and saved Isaac.[22] Thus God successfully made a distinction between the sacrifice itself, and Abraham’s underlying motives for the sacrifice:
- God was pleased with Abraham’s love, trust, and good motives.
- God had no desire for any human sacrifice.
Thus one of the culture’s prevaling lies was unmasked. And with God’s next move, many of the remaining lies would be destroyed as well.
Instead of demanding a sacrifice from Abraham’s possessions, God provided a gift of His own. In this sacrifice, God would be manifest as the great Giver and Provider of good things, not a needy god who demands payment from humans.
And the sacrifice God provided was something very special—a ram—simultaneously sending two powerful messages:
- Abel’s ancient sacrifice was good and pure. As that righteous man had offered a young lamb to God as a free-will offering, from a heart of reverence and love, so this righteous man, Abraham, would offer a ram to God, also from a reverent heart filled with love.
- By slaying the ram, Abraham would be openly rejecting the pagan religions around him, forever cutting ties with Enki,[23] the ram-headed god of Ur, and Khnum, the ram-headed god of Egypt.[24] By doing the very thing which was considered an abomination by the Egyptians,[25] Abraham was openly sacrificing any ties he may have formerly had to any pagan religion.
This was also an important witness for the sake of Abraham’s countless descendants who would later spend centuries enslaved in Egypt. As children of Abraham and spiritual children of Abel, they were shepherds, and they were descendants of one who had worshiped God by slaying a ram. Thus, they must have nothing to do with the ram-headed gods of Egypt.
VIII. The Passover Lamb
Alas, though the children of Israel greatly multiplied in number, they did not remain faithful to the Lord. Over the centuries in Egypt, they became steeped in Egyptian paganism, worshiping their demonic bull-headed and ram-headed gods.
The time came for God to rescue His people from slavery, and to remove them from the corruption of Egypt. But the question remained, would He be able to remove the corruption of Egypt from His people?
Judging the gods of Egypt, God sent 10 mighty plagues, bringing Pharaoh and the Egyptians to their knees. The tenth and final plague was a judgment on the gods of Egypt,[26] including Knhum, the great ram-headed god. They claimed this god formed the bodies and souls of children upon his potter’s wheel, and protected the lives and health of children after they were born. Khnum would be exposed as a fraud when all the firstborn children of the Egyptians would die in a single night. This god would not be able to save them.
As Abel had offered a pleasing sacrifice of a lamb, and as Abraham had offered a pleasing sacrifice of a ram, God instructed His people to offer sacrificial lambs on the first Passover. This would identify them with Abel and with Abraham, and it would symbolize their utter rejection of the false religion of Egypt. By sacrificing sheep, they would be an abomination to the Egyptians, severely offending them, turning their backs on both Egypt and its gods.
God instructed His people to sacrifice lambs, not because He needed blood, but because His people needed to be cleansed from multiple centuries of idolatry. What God really wanted them to sacrifice was their false religion, and this was the first step in getting them to do it.
By slaying lambs, God’s people had turned their backs on the ram-headed gods of Egypt. They departed from Egypt, and in a great show of God’s miraculous power, they crossed the Red Sea on dry land, and Pharaoh’s army was drowned.
Now the time had come for God to enter a formal covenant with His people. By slaying sacrificial bulls, God’s people would openly turn their backs on Apis, Mnevis, and Bucas, the three bull-gods widely worshiped in Egypt.[27] The blood of a slain bull was sprinkled on God’s people, and they promised to be faithful to God and to keep His commands.[28]
Having turned their backs on Egypt’s gods, and having slain lambs and bulls—two of the most sacred animals in the Egyptian religion—God’s people were set to live a new way, loving God and loving their neighbor, following the two greatest commandments. With love and gratitude, they would bring God free-will offerings just like righteous Abel, Melchizedek, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had done. Their offerings would be of oil, flour, praise, and produce from their gardens, and firstling lambs from their flocks—not to pay a sin-debt to obtain forgiveness, but rather to pay a debt of gratitude to the loving God who had already forgiven them.
To be continued…
