I once had a Muslim pose this question to me: What if I lived in a village where I had a beautiful wife and family, and there suddenly broke out a plague, and the village came and told me that the only way the the plague would go away is if I offered up my only son as a propitiatory sacrifice. He used a great deal of expansive, emotional verbiage presumably in order to prick my conscience and cause me to see the very notion of God offering up his Son as a sacrifice as reprehensible.
I think this is a Muslim stock argument. Here is the appropriate response: If such a scenario occurred, I would rebuke the villagers as blasphemers for thinking that a sacrifice as utterly foul and wretched as my sinful son could suffice as a propitiatory sacrifice, and direct them toward the only sacrifice that could ever be or has ever been acceptable to God the Father for the turning away of his wrath, and this, on account of his very sinlessness(2 Cor. 5:21). There was a time God told someone to offer up his only Son, and it was intended only to foreshadow this only acceptable sacrifice. Matt from carm.org has drawn up a helpful comparison showing how Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac foreshadowed the coming of Christ:
His helpful article was written originally to answer another common Muslim stock objection, namely, whether Abraham had only one(Heb. 11:17) or two(Gal. 4:22) sons. The reader is enouraged to check it out.
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