Abraham wasn't the first person to ever walk with faith but he was credited as being the father of faith. We've looked at a number of events in his life in the previous blogs and I think what you see is a progression of crawling before he knows how to walk. If you look at his life, you can see how God continually interacts with Abraham as he slowly takes a step out of his comfort zone, tries to rely on his own strength, falls and then sees how God provides regardless. Time after time, Abraham lets this seed of faith grow but it's a long journey of transformation. It takes Abraham decades to trust God enough to leave his family, land, relatives, stop running, stop being deceitful when he gets in trouble before he finally has a child out of God's promise at age 100. All of his life leads up to this…it wasn't just a random leap because nothing else was working.
We find ourselves at the point of the story where Hagar and Ishmael were banished by a jealous Sarah who now had her own child. Years passed and Isaac grew into a teenager or thereabouts. Abraham and Sarah started to believe God could do anything if they could give them a son at their ridiculous ages.
The summary of Gen. 22 is this:
God tells Abraham to go to a mountain "I will show you" and sacrifice your one and only son to me…Now that sounds pretty jacked up to me…Does that sound like the God you know? I can only imagine what Abraham is thinking. He sleeps on it, most likely tells Sarah and then prepares to go the next morning with his son and two servants. Even if Abraham didn't tell Sarah, she probably could have guessed something was up because she had been around the block a few times before.
Regardless, the group of them took off for this mountain which likely was about a 3 day walk. When they neared the place of the sacrifice, Abraham had his servants stay away while Isaac carried the wood for his own sacrifice. Like his mother, Isaac knew something was up and even questioned his dad saying "hey, dad…ummm we've got the wood and fire and everything but where's the sacrifice?"
Abraham's answer was that God would provide one. Later, the bible shares with us his reasoning that even if he killed his son, God could raise him from the dead!!! That's quite the transition from his outburst of laughing that he could produce a child in his old age.
The two of them got everything set up and then Abraham tied his son to the wood and was about to bring the knife down on him when God stopped him…
Rest assured, Abraham was intent on doing it…I can't imagine the turmoil in his heart for those days…or maybe it truly was complete peace because he knew God could and would provide somehow…that He would make good on HIS promise. Even so, how do you think this teenage boy felt about being tied down and having his dad raise the knife on him? I can imagine that either there's a ridiculous trust in him or there was quite the struggle. Either way it's hard for me to truly imagine this scene let alone what it was foreshadowing.
In the end, God provided a lamb to be slain in Isaac's place. However, that visual was so strong that when John the baptizer saw Jesus coming and said "behold the lamb who comes to take away the sin of the world," people knew what he was referring to. Jesus was to become the sacrificial lamb on our behalf…He was the son that the Father actually did kill in our stead. He was the promise fulfilled through Abraham and his seed.
