Clough Genesis Lesson 60

Abraham offers Isaac – Genesis 22:1-14

In Genesis 22 we are beginning a new section of the book of Genesis; up to this point the Messianic seed promised to Abraham has been just that, a promise. Beginning in Genesis 22 we see the life of the seed actually existing, and since this is the dispensation of Israel, we want to notice that beginning from Abraham on down to the cross of Jesus Christ, throughout the dispensation of Israel you have God acting according to a certain economy. That is, God is revealing Himself to the world through Israel. We have, in other words, a semi missionary setup; the Word of God comes to one people, not all people, and then that one people sends the Word across cultural barriers and boundaries to peoples across the face of the earth. That’s one characteristic. Another is that Israel has been called out, not as a spiritual people but as a physical one, to create a divine viewpoint counterculture for all the earth to see. This, plus other reasons and other things characterizes this particular dispensation.

What we’re interested in is beginning in Genesis 22 we watch how God works to mold the seed that He wants. Up to this point it’s all been heavenly decrees; it’s all been things that God has done in anticipation of His promises but now we actually get it all out in the open and watch the things that the seed undergoes. And as you saw from the reading you are already aware that this probably represents one of the most powerful chapters in all the Word of God. Genesis 22 is the most ethically pointed chapter apart from certain chapters in the New Testament, Genesis 22 is a great, great moral climax in the Old Testament. But God, in order to teach these ethical problems and these ethical solutions always teaches in the context of something concrete; He doesn’t give us abstract things. He always shows us real concrete people living in a real concrete place in real concrete moments of time. This happened in Beer-sheba, and it says that Abraham took three days to go and give the offering at a place called Moriah. All of these names are deeply loaded; in fact, we’ll see before we’re finished how Genesis 22 is a chapter that decides, not only defines but decides, the terminology of the Lord Jesus Christ and how He is pictured in the New Testament. This is a setup in the full sovereign meaning of the word “setup.”

Let’s look, first of all at the place surrounding Beersheba and also where this Moriah is and this will give us some sense of flow and hopefully show us the sovereignty of God, not only acting in place but also acting over time. Looking first at the overall chart of Israel, remembering the topography once again, the north/south mountain chain that is located just to the west of the Dead Sea and along that mountain chain the road on which all the businessmen traveled. It was on that road that Abraham did most of his things and on which most of the adventures of Genesis took place. This is a picture of a capitalist businessman; God worked and started his divine viewpoint counterculture with a man who went out and produced, he was reliant, he was responsible, he had a large business, he made a prophet in his business, and he was successful in other ways than just merely what we would call the merely religious.

Abraham, it says at the beginning of the story, started out from Beersheba; here on the southwest portion of the map. For three days he moved north/northeastward to a place called Mount Moriah. Where was this place? It was the place on which Solomon would later build his temple on the east side of Jerusalem. Moriah is a code name; the real reason for naming this particular mountain “Moriah” is given in the context of the story; we’ll explain it later. But the place is the east side of Jerusalem. Coming up closer and looking at the city street map of Jerusalem today we find this open area where there’s no street. If you could look at that area more closely you would see that it’s called the old city and in this old city the central part of the Jerusalem of Christ’s day is preserved. The city was very, very small in Bible times; in fact, the main city back in Abraham’s time, occupied by the Jebusites, was down here, this square you see is today the temple complex but south of that here, here is the city of David, and before him the city of the Jebusites. It was a small city, occupying that little peninsula of land and just north of that Solomon built his temple and that temple was the place where Solomon constructed his; it was the place of the second temple in Ezra and Nehemiah; it was the place of Herod’s temple in the time of Christ and when Islam began it was the place where the Muslims built their famous temple. All four of these temples are founded on the top of the rock of Mount Moriah. Today this temple complex just to the north of this wall, this part here was a dig that they were just starting; it’s all finished now, occupying layers of territory from about 100 BC to AD 100.

Looking at it as it must have looked in Christ’s time this time from the northeast, looking down at the Roman fortress of Antonia and then the temple complex, the inner sanctuary here. That inner sanctuary is located over the top of the mountains; this little pinnacle of rock if you could see it, it peaks right underneath that building and that’s the place where Abraham offered Isaac. Today it’s occupied by one of the mosques of the Moslem faith, the goal of which in the dome was generously given to the Arabs by Uncle Sam. So we have this situation and you’ll see from that brief survey of history that many, many things happened on Moriah. Moriah has a great, great history behind it and it starts in Genesis 22. The reason for the mosque on that particular site is the fact that by Islamic tradition Mohammed ascended into heaven on a horse from the top of that mountain so lots of interesting things have been claimed to have happened and did happen there.

The text says, Genesis 22:1, “And it came to pass after these things, that God tested Abraham,” God tested him. Real faith will always be tested; you can bet your last dollar that the sovereign God will always test you in order to build you, in order to lead your faith higher. You can see where this is mentioned in the New Testament; turn to James, this particular location has been a fond habit of critics; critics have often maintained that this passage in James is a flat-out, no-holds-barred contradiction to the teachings of the apostle Paul. Paul taught that a man is justified by faith along, sola fide, and there is no impartation of credit to his account on the basis of his moral works.

But in James 2:18 it says: “A man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works; show me thy faith without thy works, and I will show thee my faith by my works. [19] Thou believest that there is one God; you believe well. The demons also believe, and tremble. [20] But will you know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead? [21] Was not Abraham, our father, justified by works, when he had offered Isaac, his son, upon the altar? [22] Do you see how faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect? [23] And the Scripture was fulfilled which said, Abraham believed God and it was credited [imputed] to him for righteousness; and he was called the friend of God. [24] You see, then, that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.” And so verse 24, they say, is an outright flat denial of the teachings of the apostle Paul and a contradiction exists in the Scripture, so claim the critics.

But is it a contradiction or is it just looking at two aspects of faith? Paul said that when a man is justified by faith, the point is that the faith that Paul is talking about is an invisible thing; it is that which God received, so to speak, or accepts as His “condition,” (in quotes), His “condition” for our justification. “By faith is a man justified,” independently of whatever works may surround and be the produces of that faith, that’s not the issue because all those works are tinged with sin. And therefore all those works do not qualify as a perfect merit before God. So it’s by faith and ONLY by faith, sola fide, faith alone faith.

But then what is James talking about. The key is given in verse 18; it says, “a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works; you show me your faith without your works and I will show you my faith by my works.” It’s clear from the context the emphasis is on the evidence of the faith. How does one observe the existence of faith? God can observe the existence of faith very simply because God has omniscience. God has total perfection; God is aware of all knowledge all the time and therefore the issue isn’t showing your faith to God; God knows about that. The issue is showing your faith in history; is there any evidence of faith? Can we measure it in ounces, grams, or cubic centimeters? Do we have some sort of X-ray machine by which we measure faith, and the answer is no. There’s only one way faith can identify itself and that is by generating works that are those which fit the mold of Scripture. That’s the only evidence we have of saving faith. James is looking at it from the standpoint, if your faith is there then real saving faith ought to produce evidences. Faith shows itself by its modification of our behavior interlined with Scripture. So we have, then, the existence of saving faith.

But you notice that in James 2:21 to show this James cites Genesis 22; verse 21 is Genesis 22. But you’ll also see that in a few more verses, in James 2:23, you’ll see that he’s citing another passage so let’s get all this data down on a timeline so we don’t get confused because there’s a big argument in here and if you don’t map it out you’ll miss the point. In Genesis 15 Abraham was justified; in Genesis 15 we would say he was saved, in the full sense of the word, as far as we know under the Old Testament economy. Abraham was justified by faith at that point in time, verse 6, and it’s that verse that is quoted in James 2:23. Now people say that James contradicts himself when in verse 21 he cites the sacrifice of Isaac. But the sacrifice of Isaac doesn’t come until Genesis 22, sometime later and it’s that sacrifice that James speaks of in his verse 21. Now why does James do this? Why does he tie these two events together? Is he trying to bypass Paul? Not at all.

James 2:23 says, “The Scripture was fulfilled,” the Scripture had declared in Genesis 15 that he was a believer, that he had trusted, that saving faith existed. What he’s saying is that that pronouncement by God might not have been visible to those there at the time; there might not have been wholly visible evidences that would say I know that man, Abraham, is a believer. And so therefore, later James says God developed his faith and built his faith and built his faith until the great crisis of Genesis 22, and at this point it became obvious that saving faith had been there all along. This is an evidence in retrospect, it’s an evidence of what has already existed. He’s not being saved twice or any such thing as this.

Now in this situation we notice a few interesting details. You’ll notice that saving faith always produce works. James says, “Faith without works is dead.” Real faith will always show evidence of its own existence somehow, somewhere, because God the Holy Spirit is sovereignly working out sanctification. It will come to pass. Now there have been those who have risen in church history from time to time, there was an extreme form of it around John Bunyan’s day in Reformed circles, people called Antinomian; capital “A”, it wasn’t used as a common noun then, it was used as a theological label, and these people taught that saving faith could be sovereignly worked in the human heart without any external observable evidence, and hence the term, Antinomian, that is, there was no legal, moral requirements to say hey, that person is saved, he could be doing anything he wanted to, still he’s saved. But in the Scriptures we find that saving faith at least, not perfectly, but will always show some fruit of its existence.

We go back to Genesis 22 and get set for this great trial. It’s going to be a test; the test isn’t to see whether Abraham’s a believer; the test is to pressure his faith and to let it reveal itself to other men and angels, if there are any watching. In doing so God shows His election and justification of Abraham. You see, election and justification are acts that are invisible to the human eye. Can you see someone elected? Can you see someone justified? No. Can God? Yes. Is it a point event? Yes. But can you see it? No. Well then you can only see the results of election and justification; that’s all we’ve got, we can speculate theologically what happens but when we come right down to the nitty-gritty I can’t tell you what happens and no other theological can tell you what happens. We work backwards from the observed revelation in history and we see and we observe Abraham to undergo the greatest test asked of any believer in all of history except Jesus Christ in His perfect humanity. That’s why Genesis 22 has given birth to moral controversy for centuries; Genesis 22 is looked backward to in the New Testament time and time and time again. Again, why? The trial you are not about to witness is the greatest trial, apparently, a man could ever have faced.

With that introduction we now observe some of the details of the trial. Keep in mind that if you are a Christian the Bible calls you a child of Abraham. Do you know what the Bible means by that? It means at least this: it means that you have faith that is parallel to Abraham’s faith. It means that you must have faith that looks like Abraham’s faith. Therefore the question we ought to be asking ourselves as we watch this man sweat it out and undergo one of the greatest trials a believer ever had, how would you fare under these conditions.

Genesis 22:1, “[And it came to pass after these things,] that God did test Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and Abraham said, Behold, here am I. [2] And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom you love, and get you into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of,” one of the most horrifying tests ever given to any person in history, an absolutely horrifying thing.

Verse 2 is so packed with material it will take us some time to thread our way through it. First of all, notice its emphasis on the “only son.” “Take now thy son, thine only son,” and when you look down at verse 12 after the trial is finished the word “only son” is repeated for emphasis, “I know that you fear God, seeing that thou has not withheld thy son, thine only son from Me.” This is the place in history where a little label got started that the Holy Spirit used in the New Testament to identify Jesus Christ our Lord with when the New Testament calls Him “the only begotten son.” Now there’s a theological difference, of course, but the label basically catches its content here.

What I want to do now is I want to expound on this little label, “only begotten son.” And I want you to visualize, enrich your mind’s eye, your imagination’s picture in your mind, see if you can picture… I want you to imagine the scene because it will play a determining function on how much you can absorb from the New Testament. I know most of you have read the New Testament when it talks this way about Jesus Christ, but how many of you have read the New Testament and have had the emotional response to that terminology that you ought to have if you understand the location of the content of that to be Genesis 22.

In other words, said another way, let’s look at a chart. Here’s God and His character; His character is incomprehensible to man. So therefore God creates an analogy; God has His creation here and in that creation He has pieces of it; for example, He designs a four-footed beast that has a strange coat and He calls it a lamb. He creates us, we’re made in God’s image. And He creates lambs so that we can look at a lamb physically and learn something about Christ. There is something in a lamb’s behavior that teaches us about Christ. We read it in the responsive reading this morning. Just so, this passage teaches us about how God, in the Godhead, God the Father and God the Son, how God the Father views God the Son. He can’t really communicate this from an eternal perspective to us so God then says I’ll teach you what it is to Me and I’ll teach you by asking one believer, poor Abraham, he didn’t volunteer, he got picked, I’ll have one believer and I’ll have him act out a role. You people are people, you are fathers and you are sons and you know what it’s like, so if I can show you by one test on earth involving one family on earth that I will preserve a record of forever and ever that you can read about and that you can empathize with, then you’ll know about me. So throughout this trial there’s one thing, one equation or one ratio you want to understand. Abraham, in this story, is to Isaac as God the Father is to God the Son. Abraham is to Isaac as God the Father is to God the Son! And involved in this will be not just a neutral, sterile, intellectual only theological proposition. There will be the warmth and there will be the emotional pain of what’s going to happen here and that emotional pain and that feeling that accompanies the story is designed to teach us something. It is designed to show us the emotions in the heart of God Himself, emotions which we normally can’t see unless God goes to special lengths to communicate his own heart to us. That’s the meaning of this trial.

So first of all the term “only begotten son” does not denote just a metaphysical theology proposition. The term “only begotten son” is a term that denotes endearment; endearment if you want to visualize the same way that Abraham and Sarah must have thought a lot of Isaac. You saw how much Abraham loved his son, Ishmael, how hard it was for Abraham to part with Ishmael and Ishmael wasn’t the seed. Now here’s the seed who for 25 years he and his wife waited for and they couldn’t have children and they couldn’t have children and they couldn’t have children, year after year after year after year. Finally, after 35 years this son is born and it’s a day of rejoicing; and it’s Abraham’s and it’s Sarah’s and they enjoy him, and they just get him up to the point of adolescence and boom, God hasn’t spoken for years and then suddenly He speaks this: take him out and I want you to religiously murder him on a mountain that I will show you—one of the most powerful commands ever given in history.

The “only begotten son” is a term of endearment. If when you read that in the New Testament from now on and you see that you won’t think of it just as a theological proposition about metaphysical structures in the Trinity, but you will visualize that as a term of personal endearment and think over in your mind’s eye, you can picture Genesis 22, there’s not one person sitting here this morning that in your mind’s eye, in your imagination you can’t reconstruct this scene to your own satisfaction. If you want to have George C. Scott play Abraham have George C. Scott play Abraham. I prefer him as Patton myself but whatever you want to do with it, in your mind’s eye picture the story and use this to load your soul so that when you read the text of the New Testament the truth comes off the page and hits you. That’s one thing you want to see about verse 2.

There’s another thing and this may astound you; it astounded me when I discovered it. Look at the verbs in verse 2 carefully. It says, “Take now thy son, thine only son, Isaac, whom thou lovest,” the bombshell is that this is the first occurrence of the word “love” in the Bible. This is the first time the word “love” occurs in all of the Bible. You would have thought somewhere in the 21 chapters up to this point the word “love” would have been mentioned. And isn’t it astounding that the first time the verb “love” is mentioned it’s not between a husband and his wife. The first time the “love” is mentioned it’s between a father and his son. Why is this? If the first occurrence of a word in the progress of revelation is deeply significant, then this must be telling us something about the nature of love.

In fact, if it is true, and we make this ratio, Abraham is to Isaac as the Father is to the Son and Abraham loves Isaac and there’s the first occurrence of love, then we see that the Trinity, when God goes to communicate Himself to us, He uses the mode of a father’s love for his son, not the mode of a husband’s love for his wife in this context, but of a father’s love for his son. It must be teaching us that there is where the most strong bonds are formed, between a father and his son; more strong, even, than between a husband and his wife. I don’t know why this happens, I can’t give you all the reasons why. Maybe you can speculate on it yourself and do some thinking about this point. I think one reason is this; that a father, when he loses his son, has lost an irreplaceable element in the sense of inheritance under the Old Testament, whereas a husband can lose his wife, he can marry another woman and carry on the name but if he’s lost his firstborn, he lost, it’s gone. Yes, you can re-adopt and so forth, that may have something to do with it but just to teach you and knock out any skepticism that this is a minor point, let’s go to the New Testament and see where in the New Testament the word “love” first occurs.

Turn to Matthew 3:17, the theme is the baptism of Jesus. John has just finished baptizing Jesus; the crowd stands around watches, and suddenly a voice from heaven comes and says, “This is My loved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” Again, the first occurrence of love in the New Testament is not between that of a husband and a wife but between the Father and his Son at the scene of baptism.

Mark 1:11, the second Gospel; the first occurrence of the word “love” in this gospel, let’s see where it is. “And there came a voice from heaven,” exactly the same scene, exactly the same characters, exactly the same setting, “Thou art My loved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” a father’s love for his son, the first occurrence in Mark.

Turn to Luke 3:22, here a slightly different observation but the same scene with the same actors and the same text. “The Holy Spirit descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon Him,” that is upon Jesus just after His baptism, “and a voice came from heaven and said, Thou are My loved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” The third time the word “love” occurs in one of the Gospels and it occurs with the Father/Son.

Now let’s go, we’ve looked at the three synoptic Gospels and obviously all three synoptic Gospels are parallel in some respects, what do you suppose would happen if we went to the fourth gospel, that’s not written after the structure of the synoptics. Turn to John and let’s examine in John where the first verb to love occurs. It occurs in John 3 and it occurs in the verse you are all familiar with, the most popular verse in the Bible. “For God so loved the world,” what did He give? His Son. Now this theme is just too obvious, too consistent to be kissed off as a chance happening. It’s too enduring from cover to cover; why does the Bible insist and elevate the Father/Son relationship so high that the Trinity itself uses that relationship as an analog. Down here we experience some love of a father and a son but it’s enough, apparently, to give adequate data to our souls what it’s like inside the Trinity.

Now this is why the strongest trial, apparently, therefore, that a believer can face is for a father to lose his son. This is what the Scripture is saying in Genesis 22; it’s singled out, the one area of living where it would be nearest in our level to what goes on in the Trinity at the time of the cross and of all the places it picks the father and his son and says all right, we’ll set up a trial on earth; Abraham will be the one leading character in this trial and we will cast him in the role where he stands in for God the Father. Now the Holy Spirit says you look; you watch this man struggle with the loss of his son and when you’ve watched this happen, then you’ve understood what it’s like for Me when I lost My Son at the cross.

Let’s go back to Genesis 22:2; it says, go “take that son, your only begotten son [Isaac], whom you love, and get to the land of Moriah.” Now this land of Moriah, why is the area north of Jerusalem located called Moriah? Moriah is a Hebrew short form, it’s a label for a place, it’s a short form of verse 14. Skip down to verse 14 and you’ll see what the label means. “Abraham called the name of the place Jehovah-jireh, as it is said to this day, In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen.” I’ll explain all that in a moment but right now the word “Jehovah-jireh” is actually a long form that is shortened up, I can’t go through all the phonetic transforms here, it’d take half an hour to do it, but the point is, that is related to the end of the word Moriah; “m” is a prefix on a Hebrew noun when it means place, like for example the Hebrew word for sacrifice is such and such, you put an “m” in front of it and it’s the place of sacrifice. And so it’s a standard Hebrew construction. This “o” is related to Yahweh. So “Moriah” is a code name, it’s a shortened abbreviated code name for verse 14. It is loaded with all the content of the story but we’ll get to that content as we go along.

So, go to Mount Moriah, “and offer him there fore a sacrifice [burnt offering]” and this introduces two ethical dilemmas that critics of Christianity have wrestled with for hundreds of years and Christians have too. Here are the two ethical dilemmas: the first one is that there seems to be a collision of two commands of God here. On the one hand God says it is evil to murder and this is religious murder. And you can see the prophets, when they inveigh against Moloch worship in the Bible, what is Moloch worship? It’s where, in a most cruel form in the ancient world parents would take their children and they’d dedicate them to Moloch and the priest would select some of these and they would burn the babies alive over the fire and while the babies were screaming out their last breath the priests would sit and they would beat their drums, beating to avoid hearing the sound of the infants as they screamed their last breath. That was Moloch worship and God in His prophets condemned it. And so God, we know, condemns religious murder, yet here’s the God of the Bible asking for religious murder.

That’s one ethical conflict. Kierkegaard used this in his book, Fear and Trembling, to show what he thought was the irrational nature of the Christian faith. Said Kierkegaard, you go through history and you see something like Abraham in Genesis 22, you see one absolute that says do it, another absolute that says don’t do it, therefore if you sit there and you think too long you never can decide anything; either your mind occupies itself with that absolute or it occupies itself with this absolute, and you go nuts. So Kierkegaard’s answer was on the basis of this example, cancel oyur mind, shut it off and leap to the dark, an existential decision in a moment of time. Kierkegaard used this is a very deadly way and he was so effective that his analysis of Genesis 22 has colored theology all the way down to our present time. That’s the first ethical dilemma, how, and what does a believer do when he gets two commands of God going in two different directions.

The second ethical dilemma: Can God undo His own promises? God said, and promised that Isaac would bear the seed that would bear the seed that would bear the seed that would bear the seed, all the way down through history, to the Messiah. If Isaac dies before he marries a girl and has a child, a male child, then the promise of God becomes null and void. So the second dilemma is how can God order this and jeopardize His own promises? Can God break His own Word? So these are two very, very powerful puzzles that are associated, and have been for centuries, with Genesis 22.

So go to the mountain and religiously murder your son and I’ll tell you where I want you to do it. Now in Genesis 22:3 we find Abraham in his classic pose, the man of simple faith, instant obedience, “And Abraham rose up early in the morning,” and he went. [“…and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and cut the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.”] Now some people who saw the movie, The Bible, and they saw George C. Scott’s interpretation of this event, fussed and fumed and carried on because they felt that Scott wrong portrayed Abraham as arguing with God. I don’t think Scott did at all. You can criticize him, maybe, his performance in other things but I don’t think you have a right to criticize that interpretation. I believe that Abraham probably did shake his fist at God and slam his fist into the wall. The Bible doesn’t say he didn’t; the Bible says He obeyed; it doesn’t say he was very happy obeying. That’s the other thing you want to remember about saving faith; it always isn’t ha-ha, joy, joy, joy kind of thing. And this goes on in history; you have to understand this, the tough phase of justification isn’t always joyous. And you can quote Galatians 5:22 about the joy of the Spirit all you want to and I’ll show you scene after scene in Scripture that will refute that easy application of Galatians 5:22. It’s not true… it’s not true that justifying faith always has a smile on it; it doesn’t. And I think Scott was very correct in the way he yelled at God and he cast his fist at God and slammed his fist into the rock, no, he says. And that’s probably what happened.

But the point is, with all of that stirring in his soul, it says in verse 3 he obeyed anyway. There’s no disjunction between obeying something that’s ponderous, threatening and heavy, simply obeying it because that’s the thing you’ve got to do versus just thinking that you’re not going to obey something unless you’re just positively ecstatic about it. We have a disease in our generation; we think the only thing we would obey is something we just are so positively enraptured about we couldn’t do anything else. Baloney! The Bible is the voice of realism and it says you obey, whether you like it or not. This is why I cherish for most young men, for all young men getting out of college, that you go in the military and spend 2 or 3 years, and I know people say well that’s just Clough doing his thing. I have a reason for saying that and the reason I have for saying that is because it gives you an experience you can’t get anywhere else. That’s why. To stand there and have somebody chew your butt up one side and down the other for about five minutes and never repeat one word, you didn’t know the English language had so many four-lettered words in it. It’s amazing. And to have an order, and to have that order say you will do this. Yes sir! You don’t do it with a sigh, yes sir, I’d just love to do that. Well, this is what Abraham is facing right here; he has an order and he carries it out and he doesn’t like it.

So he “took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, [and cut the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went to the place of which God had told him,]” and he goes to the place where God told him. Notice, incidentally, the details, on the third day he comes to the place; three days he’s in the trial. It reminds you of one who descended into hell for three days. Genesis 22:4, “[Then on the third day] Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off.” Now I want you to watch something in this narrative, we’re only going to go down to verse 14 today, and I want you to as we go through the text to watch something. The author is directing your attention to the visual sense; of all the empirical senses, touching, hearing, feeling, seeing, it’s the sense of sight that is prominent in this text. So you watch how many times “eyes” are in there, “see” is in there, “lift up your eyes,” “cause to appear.” Watch those verbs.

And so Abraham, on the third day he “lifted up his eyes, and saw the place.” [5] “And Abraham said to h is young men, Stay here with the ass; I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you,” we will come again to you. That last verb is a plural, not a singular and with the last verb in verse 5 we suddenly have one of the resolutions to the moral dilemma posed by this command. How do we solve that critic’s attack? Is God contradicting His own Word? Not at all. We have the key in the last verb in verse 5, “we will come again.” Who’s “we”? The scene is Mount Moriah, at the base of Mount Moriah over here we have the two men, Abraham says you stay here and I and my son will go up here, when we worship we will come back. Now he knows very well what God has ordered him to do and that is religiously murder his son. This is why it was effective in the move, The Bible, when they had Isaac look up at Abraham and he said father, is there anything this God would ask of you that you wouldn’t do? And Abraham says no. It’s beautiful, that’s exactly the point here.

Turn to Hebrews 11:19, here is how Abraham resolved the second of the two moral dilemmas. Remember the second one was will God go back on His own plan, on His own promise and shatter the Messianic seed. In Hebrews 11:19 it tells you how Abraham in his own mind handled the pressure. “Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead,” now that is not resurrection; if he was raised in resurrection he would be unable to reproduce himself into the next generation. So apparently what he’s saying there, God would raise him up in the sense Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead; it’s resuscitation, not resurrection. He would resuscitate him to a natural body and therefore Hebrews 11:19 tells us something; it’s what I call the n + 1^th option, and that is when God’s Word puts you in a particular pressure situation where you don’t know which way to go and it looks like you’re going to be damned if you do and damned if you don’t, as in this situation because if he doesn’t kill his son then he disobeys; if he does kill his son he ruins the promises of God, there always, if there are n options that you can there’s always go to be n + 1 that are actually available. The n + 1^th option you don’t see and you’ve got to buy it by faith; there’s got to be another option that you don’t see and you’ve got to go ahead and trust that that n + 1^th option will somehow show itself. And here in verse 19 Abraham reasoned, there’s got to be another option to this thing. If I kill my son up there he’s got to come back because he’s got to reproduce the Messianic seed so I don’t care what happens, if I religiously murder him on Mount Moriah then God Himself has to call him from the dead so we can get back down there and go on living. It’s got to be that way. It’s an inference, God did not tell Abraham, nowhere in verse 19 does it say God told Abraham the secret; it says “accounting that God was able to.” Verse 19 doesn’t even say God is going to, it just, in his own mind, Abraham reasoned God can do this and therefore I’m going to risk the fact that God can do this to get me out of this. And so he goes ahead and carries out the order.

The first of the two moral dilemmas, so the second of the two moral dilemmas is solved because God has this plan that goes on and it may jig and jag a little bit but it goes on. The second of those two dilemmas is the idea of two moral absolutes in collision. The Bible never treats this because the Bible doesn’t feel this is a problem; the problem is with Kierkegaard, not with the Bible, and the problem with Kierkegaard is this: that he has this view that morals are absolutes suspended in thin air, whereas the Bible never visualizes morals as absolute suspended in thin air. The Bible visualizes as absolutes as hanging off of God’s character. So if God wants to expand at one place in time on one of His absolutes He does so—His prerogative. If He tells Abraham to murder, then by definition it’s right. People don’t like this; you can see now why Genesis 22 is such a hateful, despicable chapter in the eyes of a thinking non-Christian, because there’s no way you can read Genesis 22 without bowing your knee to a totally sovereign God that does as He pleases. And men hate this; it’s awful in their sight, to have the idea that God could actually come down and tell you to religiously murder your own son, and you’d say yes Sir, that’s right. Why? Because God said so, by definition what God says is right.

So we have, then the first moral dilemma is resolved because in the Bible it’s not considered to be a dilemma. Only the second dilemma is considered to be the real one in the Scriptures.

So, coming back to Genesis, to build up the tension of this trial, in Genesis 22:6-8, we have the author doing something here that I want you to observe carefully, appreciate how the Spirit’s moved him along to present us this material. Look at verse 6, 7 and 8, and count the number of times, to build up the tension and the drama, the author has used the personal pronouns of him, his father, his son. Read it to yourself as I read this out loud. Genesis 22:6, “And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together. [7] And Isaac spoke unto Abraham, his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? [8] And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: [so they went both of them together.]”

Why does the author keep doing this, repeatedly in verses 6-8? Do you know why? Because verses 6-8 take place on the walk up the mountain. Verse 6, verse 7, verse 8; verse 9 is up on the mountaintop. Verse 6, 7 and 8 are on the way up there. And on the way up there, as this father and his son walk alone, the two young men are left, verse 5, it’s a father son dialogue and this is where the author wants to just get you right in his fist and crush you because right here he’s picked the most deep love relationship. And verses 6-8 are to show you the relationship Abraham did have with Yitzhak; it wasn’t an aberrant relationship, a screwy relationship, a loose relationship. It was a deep father/son relationship. It was a model father/son relationship. So when you get to verse 9 and you realize that he lays him on the altar upon the wood, it’s not just oh well, ho hum, what else would you like me to do God. Nothing like that at all, far more poignant and powerful than that. Incidentally, verse 6 tells us something about ancient life in the world; it shows you how, though they didn’t have matches, it shows you they didn’t every time they want to start a fire rub two sticks together; they carried it around with some sort of a lighter or lantern with them at all times. That’s why it says “he took the fire in his hand,” he doesn’t have a Hindu fire in his hand but he has some sort of a tool, like a lantern that he keeps for lighting fires for his altars.

So in Genesis 22:8, at the very end, when his son, asked him for it, it says in the King James, “My son, God will provide himself a lamb,” I told you that the primary sense of this passage is optical; the author wants to communicate an optical and a visual image to you and the word “provide” isn’t provide, it’s the Hebrew word “see,” “God will see a lamb for Himself.” Yes, it means provide, but I still say the Hebrew stem is “see” and that’s going to be used later on as we’ll see in a moment. The idea would be… we use the word “see” to provide; for example, you ask somebody, “will you see to it” that such and such is done; we’ve used the word “see” and we really mean provide. And that, apparently, is how the verb is acting here. “God Himself will see to it that there’s a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.” Notice too the word “together.” Notice in verse 6, “together.” See the bond of unity between father and son; it’s got to be there or this fails as an illustration of the bond of unity between God the Father and God the Son.

So you have a model father and a model son and they go together. Genesis 22:10, “And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. [11] And the angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven,” I’ve never read verses 10-11 but I don’t think of boy God is prompt, you know, he’s playing it to the tenth of a second here. Abraham… it the angel kind of stuttered the first word Isaac would have been dead, but just with the proper timing, God takes it out to the last thousandths of an inch and then he stops; perfect sovereignty in time. “Abraham,” suppose Abraham had a hearing aid that failed right at that time. “And he said, Here am I. [12] And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God,” literally it means “now I know that you are a God-fearer, seeing that you have not withheld your son, your only son from me.” In other words, God is over awed by this man’s faith. Yeah, God is omniscient and knows it but stop thinking of God as some impersonal platonic stone statue on his little marble throne; this is the way Christians think of this. They get hold of the attributes of God and then they run them through Plato and come out with an immobile God. That’s not the God of the Bible; the God of the Bible responds this way, and God responds and He says, “I know that you fear God.” You, Abraham, with 100%, have passed the most awful test I could give any believer; you are a God-fearer.

Now I said that this passage loads and informs many verses that you’ve read in the New Testament and maybe never connected the two. I want you to look one more time at verse 12, then I’m going to take you to a passage in the New Testament that’s built on this. Think of the picture; here’s God the Father and God the Son in heaven; analogous, downstairs in history we have Abraham and Yitzhak. God looks down and he sees Abraham and He says, Abraham, now I know you’re a God-fearer because you haven’t withheld anything from me.

Watch how Paul takes this powerful picture and turns it around for you and for me in Romans 8. See, here’s where the awe of New Testament theology begins, only as you know the concrete stories of the old. Romans 8:32, “He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things.” You see, back here Abraham is about to kill Isaac and not spare him. God looks down and he says Abraham, you don’t even spare your own son for Me; I know you’re a God-fearer. Paul picks that picture up, the father and the son and in place of God he puts the Christian. God the Father has not spared His own Son, but given His Son for you; how shall he not, if he does that, give you all other things. You see how powerful this story illuminates New Testament doctrine.

Let’s see how the story concludes; Genesis 22. And when the angel interrupts Abraham from the slice to his son’s throat, and that’s how he was to kill him, apparently; sacrificially you always slice the throat, those of you who saw the film of the lamb being sacrificed in Israel, you saw how the priest slices the lamb’s throat and sits there and lets it bleed to death, and this is how sacrifice was done and that’s how he would have sliced Isaac’s throat.

Genesis 22:13, “And Abraham lifted up his eyes,” see there’s the word sight again, he “lifted up his eyes, and look, and he beholds [behind him] a ram caught in a thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and he took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the place of his son. [14] And therefore Abraham called the name of the place Jehovah-jireh, as it is said to this day,” and the word “jireh” comes off the Hebrew verb to see, “Jehovah sees.” Jehovah sees what; at the end it is said, “as it is said to this day, In the mount of Jehovah it shall be seen.” What shall be seen? What was seen in verse 13? The substitutionary sacrifice was seen in verse 13; wasn’t it the ram that was caught in the thicket that was seen by Abraham, and where was it seen? It was seen on the mountain of Jehovah. That’s why in verse 4 I said “Abraham lifted up his eyes,” and he saw the mountain, he saw the mountain and eventually he would see the ram, and the ram was caught in a thicket, and the ram became the burnt offering in place of his son. There was no debate that worship had to take place. Verse 5 says I am going yonder and I am going to worship. The only debate in Genesis 22 is a debate on who will be the sacrifice? Isaac or a substitute? And it’s the substitute ram that is seen.

What did we say Mount Moriah was? It was a place where Solomon built his temple; it was a place where the second temple was built in Ezra and Nehemiah’s time. It was a place where Herod built his temple and it was the place where Jesus Christ presented Himself, on Mount Moriah “it shall be seen.” What shall be seen? The One who will stand in our place, the One who, like the ram, was caught in the thicket, that One, He will be seen in the mountain of God. Jesus Christ was seen in John 2 when He cleaned the temple out. He was seen because the trial, I showed you the fortress of Antonia, just outside the northwest temple wall, that’s where Christ was tried. He was seen, He was tried and he was judged on the mountain of God, but that’s not all.

Turn in the New Testament to see how the elements of this picture are picked up. Turn to Matthew 10. There are so many themes related to Genesis 22 all I can do is just close with a few verses in the New Testament that show you the many spin-offs and then we’ll finally close with one particular spin-off. Matthew 10:34, if the father/son relationship is the most powerful relationship among human beings, so powerful that it and it alone is taken as the model for the Trinity, and it’s that relationship that is tested in Genesis 22, isn’t it striking that in Matthew 10:34-35 Jesus comes out with this: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword. [35] For I am come to set a man at variance against his father…” a man against his father? Yes, I will rupture even the father/son relationship if I have to; “a daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. [36] And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. [37] He that loves his father…” he, the son, who “loves his father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he that loves sons or daughter more than Me, is not worthy of Me.” Now, take up your cross, he says, [38, “And he that takes not his cross and follows after Me, is not worthy of Me.”] What’s the taking up of the cross? In the context it’s that awful thing of having everything, even the deep things, severed, if necessary, severed, cut, ruined, smashed and destroyed before the God who told Abraham, religiously murder your son, I ask it. And then with Abraham he said all right, I’ll do it, not happily but you do it. And that’s what Christ says, take up your cross, go ahead and have all the relationships that you love so deeply, have them fractured and if you’re not willing to have them fractured for My sake then I don’t want you.

Let’s look further how this is carried on, the motif of Genesis 22. Turn to John 1:18, a different motif but it spins off the same picture. “No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.” The son, the only begotten son was Isaac and “in the bosom of the father” means he holds him close, he hugs him, and it’s a term of endearment. And the idea is that the son is held, so that he’s almost cuddled in the bosom of the father, and it’s that son that reveals his father. See the warmness of the Trinity.

Turn to John 5:19; notice how close Jesus identifies with His Father. “[Then answered Jesus, and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you,] “The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever things He does, these also does the Son likewise.” Whatever He sees his Father do, that He does likewise. Now stop right there and don’t read the New Testament too fast; stop, pause in your mind, go back in your mind’s eye, pull out the picture that you just saw in Genesis 22. What did you just see? You saw Abraham go up there and I adlibbed from the film, remember how Isaac looked up at his dad and he said father, is there anything that God wouldn’t ask you that you’d do and his father says no. The thing that that brings out in the film and the thing that the Scriptures bring out but not explicitly is that Isaac was willing to do it. Isaac was big enough to run away from his father; his father is 100 years old, he’s not going to be trotting all over the hills of northern Palestine chasing some ten year old kid. Isaac wasn’t bound until he got to the altar. Isaac could have taken off any time. When he heard what his father was going to do he could have laughed, split and that’s the end of it. That’s good for you dad but I got another religion and I just discovered what it isn’t. No, Isaac was the firstborn of the Messianic seed so therefore the test was not only to Abraham, what character did Isaac have to take upon himself to act as the firstborn to be the model of the Messiah? I willingly become the sacrifice… I willingly become the sacrifice. And so here in verse 19 and 20 Jesus says whatever I see the Father doing I go along with Him, even if I see the Father having to put me on the cross to die for the sins of the world, I go along with Him, just like Isaac went along with his dad.

Turn to Colossians 1, here again the terminology, again slightly different motif but it comes off the same basic imagery. We could take you to dozens of verses in the New Testament; maybe this will be a discovery for you so when you read in the New Testament from now on you’ll be alert to that Genesis 22 story and you’ll see it and your mind’s eye can pull it out and digest it and reflect upon it. Colossians 1:15, Jesus Christ is “the firstborn of every creature,” talking about in his hypostatic union Jesus Christ is the first born, He stands to all the redeemed of eternity future the way Isaac stands to all of Israel in the Old Testament, He is the pioneer, the first One off the block that carries the character with Him.

Finally, Heb 5:8, Isaac had to be trained by his dad and he had, along with his father, to go to this awful scene on the top of Mount Moriah, and so in Heb 5:8 it was the same thing with Christ. “Though he were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered,” namely when Christ got to the cross and the knife, so to speak, was raised over His throat, there never was an angel to say stop it, He got it. That’s the difference between Christ and Isaac.

So what does this say to us? We could chase themes from Genesis 22 all morning but we’ve got to conclude so let’s conclude with one very simple attitude that we learn here about justifying faith that Abraham had. Turn back to Job 1, about the only way of looking at this kind of a trial, it’s not a nice trial at all, it’s not very happy, not very immediately satisfying, and I think Job 1:21 tells you about the best way of handling it. “And he said,” Job did, “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked I will return. The LORD has given and the LORD has taken away;” and whether I like it or not, “blessed is the name of the LORD.” That’s the attitude of Job, that’s the attitude of Isaac, it’s the attitude of Abraham and it’s the attitude of Christ. God who gives is also the God who has the right to take it away. Our attitude has to be not on what He gives but on Him, and if while we get our attitudes and our hearts focused too much on what He gives He will take it away, that our attention not be deflected from Him.

We’ll conclude by singing….