Viewing the Cross From the Old Testament: Genesis 22
THE LORD WILL PROVIDE
The Bible contains many difficult passages that make us scratch our heads in confusion. Few are more challenging than when God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on the altar. It leaves us with a lot of questions about the kind of God we believe in who would ask this.
Imagine you are a couple that has had trouble conceiving a child. You have tried everything that modern science has developed. No results. Then, when all hope has vanished for having a family, when you are too old to have children, the doctor tells you that you are going to have a baby. You and your spouse are the parents of a healthy boy. Fifteen years later, God somehow speaks to you and asks you to give up your beautiful son, your only child, the one on whom your hopes and dreams rest. Give him up!
That makes it too real, doesn’t it? What are we supposed to learn from a difficult situation like this? In one way or another, everything in the OT points to Jesus. Where is Jesus in this? Is the God of love found anywhere in this passage? Or do we only see a divine mischief-maker?
This is the first of five OT passages that we will be studying as we anticipate the cross of Christ. In these difficult passages, we will examine the text to discover that God is saying something to us about his plan to save us.
We are going to look at Genesis 22 from three perspectives: Abraham’s, Isaac’s, and the Lord’s. Then we will try to figure out what’s really going on in the text.
A Father’s Costly Sacrifice
There’s a lot of backstory to this encounter. In Genesis 12, God calls Abraham specifically to leave his land and his father and to go where God directs him. The Lord promises Abraham and Sarah that they will have a son through whom Abraham will be the father of many nations. But it takes a long time for them to conceive. Out of despair and desperation, Sarah tells Abraham to have a child with her maidservant. She gives Abraham a son whom he names Ishmael. But this wasn’t God’s plan and at the age of 91, Sarah gives birth to the son that the Lord had promised. In Genesis 21, Sarah has Abraham cast out into the wilderness Hagar and her son, Ishmael.
For the seventh and final time, the Lord speaks to Abraham in Genesis 22. We are told that “God tested Abraham.” Scholars say that this is the only time that God tests an individual in the Bible. God tested nations and groups of people, but never individuals. Except Abraham!
So, God tested Abraham. God calls to Abraham and tells him to take his son and sacrifice him in the land of Moriah. This is a strange test for Yahweh to issue for many reasons. First, God called Abraham out of his polytheistic family and land to essentially create a new faith, faith in Yahweh alone. Abraham came from a family that worshiped many gods, some of whom required human sacrifice. If you know Yahweh, he abhors human sacrifice. When the Lord gives Moses the law on Mount Sinai, one of the commands specifically forbids child sacrifice (see Lev. 20:1-3). So why is Yahweh stepping out of character to ask this weird request?
Second, if God’s plan is to establish a new faith out of Abraham’s only and promised son, why would he want Abraham to kill him in sacrifice? God’s plan in choosing Abraham was to establish that there is only one God, and he is to be worshiped differently than how the gods of the ANE were worshiped. From this story, it looks like Yahweh is no different than all the other gods of the ancient world.
How does Abraham respond to this test of his obedience? Strangely, Abraham does not hesitate. He gets up early the next morning, saddled his donkey, calls two young boys to come along, wakes Isaac, and then cuts wood for the altar. Notice anything out of order? Scholars speculate that Abraham was a little out of sorts about the order of things in preparation; perhaps he was a little anxious about the whole thing. But he doesn’t hesitate.
After three days, they get to the mountain that God indicated. Abraham leaves the two boys and the donkey and together with Isaac, climbs the mountain. Then he says something really odd, “We will go over there and worship and come again to you,” (5 NIV). He says, “we will worship;” he doesn’t hint at all that he’s going to sacrifice Isaac, or that Isaac isn’t coming back alive. Abraham expresses unquestioning faith. He and his son were going to enter more fully than ever into the presence of God and worship.
Was Abraham fooling himself? Was he trying to deceive the boys and Isaac? What was going on in his mind? It seems that he meant what he said when he told the boys, “we will return.” In those three days of travelling, Abraham would have had time to think and wrestle with God’s command. He must have concluded that God’s command and God’s promise would not and could not violate or contradict each other. The writer of Hebrews even tells us that Abraham believed that God would raise Isaac from the dead (see 11:19), even though that had never been done before.
Abraham possessed uncommon faith in Yahweh. This is the only explanation. He fully intended to go up the mountain, slaughter his son like a lamb, believing that God would do something utterly incredible.
A Son’s Willing Submission
Now look at the drama from Isaac’s perspective. Go back to v. 2 and see how God describes Isaac. God says, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love…” Twice more, God calls Isaac, “your son, your only son” (12, 16). Here in v. 2, God uses four descriptors to emphasize the importance of this young man.
Think of it, Isaac is not Abraham’s only son. Remember Ishmael? But as Galatians 4:23 tells us, Ishmael was born of the flesh (human effort) while Isaac was born of the promise (a gift of God). So, God’s hard drive is not full like mine when I can’t remember someone’s name or what I did yesterday. God is deliberately pointing to the covenant he has with Abraham and saying, “this son; this is the one.”
We come to the mountain again. Leaving the boys and the donkey behind, Abraham loads the wood on Isaac’s back. The wood is for the altar fire, so it’s ironic. Isaac bears the burden of the wood that will be used for his own funeral pyre. The Genesis Rabbah, the Jewish Midrash (commentary) says that Isaac with the wood on his back is like a condemned man, carrying his own cross. That’s remarkable since this is not a Christian commentator. But this is what the Jews saw.
Then Isaac asks an important question. “Where’s the lamb, dad?” Isaac is possibly in his late teens or early twenties. He’s not so dull as to ignore the missing ingredient in a sacrifice – a lamb. Did his eyes grow large as he sees his dad pull out a wicked knife? Did Abraham have a steely look in his eye as he said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son,”
But you know what’s remarkably odd? Isaac shows a voluntary submission to being sacrificed. Here’s a strong teenager entering his prime and an aged father of nearly 120 years facing off. Isaac could easily overpower his father. But he doesn’t. He allows his father to tie him with ropes and place him on the wood. Even as Abraham holds the knife aloft ready to plunge it down into his son’s chest, Isaac submits.
CFS would not appreciate this scene. This is something out of a horror flick. Something’s loco in the cabeza. But rather than seeing this from a 21st century human rights lens, we ought not to miss that Abraham and Isaac are in harmony. The narrator hints at this in v. 6 where he writes “they went both of them together.” Isaac does not play the victim card. He is a willing participant in this act of faith.
The Lord’s Gracious Provision
Now the purpose of the test is revealed. Abraham lifts his arms and prepares to make the fatal thrust. And the LORD calls out to him, “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,” (12).
We now see that Yahweh wanted to test Abraham’s faith. He said, “now I know that you fear God.” Is there anything that God doesn’t know? Did he really have to test Abraham to find out what he already knows? Or is something else going on here? We need to ask this of texts we think we know because we often skim these familiar stories and forget to “hear” the word of the Lord.
In Romans, we read that Abraham is the father of all those who believe in God. It is through Abraham that faith in God comes to all nations (that’s the blessing). The testimony that Abraham feared God is not a light application. It goes deeper and says that Abraham honored God in worship and in an upright life. Abraham is the prime example of a person who has faith in Yahweh. Abraham needed to demonstrate that faith in this act.
The key to Abraham’s faith was his confidence that the Lord would provide for him in this testing. “Moriah,” the mountain setting for this event, means “land of vision” or “to see” which anticipates Abraham’s insight that the Lord would provide. That’s why he could say to Isaac when asked about the missing lamb, “the Lord will provide.” Then when Abraham looks up and sees a ram caught in a thicket he calls that place, “the Lord will provide.”
Did you notice the time stamp on that name? He does not say “the Lord provided” (past tense), but the Lord WILL provide (future tense). And everyone in the narrator’s day still called that place “On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided.”
What’s Really Going On Here?
There are three observations that will help us to understand this passage. No doubt you have seen some of these hints as we explored the passage just now.
First, this was not Abraham’s first experience with Yahweh. Remember that this was Abraham’s seventh discussion with God. The Lord began with a man who knew nothing about the God who called him but walked patiently with him through many ups and downs, successes, and failures, spiritual and otherwise. Once, he even asked God if he would put to death the righteous with the wicked saying that would be a horrible thing. “Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Gen. 18:25).
Abraham’s confident faith in God was not automatic. It was the result of a long obedience spanning a lifetime.
Second, Abraham didn’t think that Isaac would die. We’ve seen this already in his cryptic words to the two boys, “Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you.” Then there’s the question about the missing lamb. Abraham prepared himself to do what God asked, but he expected something else to happen.
Third, the story of Abraham and Isaac is what we call a prophetic re-enactment. Throughout the OT, God often asked his prophets to act out promises of God or the will of God for his people. God told Hosea to marry a prostitute to exemplify his undeserving love for his people; God told Ezekiel to lie on his side for a year to symbolize the siege of Jerusalem (Ezek. 4). And here in Genesis 22, God asked Abraham to play the part of God in the sacrifice of his own son.
So, it’s a prophetic re-enactment. Of what? I think you can guess. Genesis 22 points to Jesus! Of all the OT glimpses of the Heavenly Father’s heart for his people, this one is a mountain over hills. It speaks of how far the Father will go to save a people that do not deserve saving, whose repetitive and unimaginative sins should disqualify them, but God keeps reaching out and saying, “I love you this much.”
Think of the parallels in the narrative. Both Isaac and Jesus are long-awaited sons. Both are beloved and only sons. That familiar phrase perked your ears. John says, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son…” (1:14; 3:16). Both are born in miraculous ways (one to a senior woman; one to a virgin). Both sons carry the wood that is to be the instrument of their deaths on their backs. In both stories, the father leads the son up the mountain, the son follows obediently toward his own death. Jesus, like Isaac, was in harmony with the Father. Jesus said he laid his life down of his own will (10:18). And finally, in both cases, God provides a sacrificial substitute (a ram, a male lamb). When John the Baptist saw Jesus coming for baptism, he said, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (1:29).
Isaac’s role in the enactment is a shadow of the true story of redemption seen in Jesus. Just as the lamb replaces Isaac on the altar, Jesus “the Lamb of God” takes our place on the cross.
The promise, “the Lord will provide,” is eloquently expressed in Paul’s words in Romans 8:31-32: “If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?”
AMEN
** much thanks to Bibleproject.com for their insights into this passage, many of which I incorporated into this message.
https://bibleproject.com/blog/why-did-god-ask-abraham-to-sacrifice-isaac/
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