Jesus and Isaac

Introduction

Abraham waited for 25 years for God to give him a son. Who knows how long before that he and Sarah had been trying to conceive, but he was 75 when God first promised to make him “a great nation” and it wasn’t until he was 100 years old that the promise of God finally came to fruition. What a sweet relief and joy must have filled him when his son Isaac was finally safely born.

What sorrow and pain must have filled his heart when the Lord spoke to him in our text today, Gen 22:1-18

Genesis 22:1–18 ESV

After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac. And he cut the wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you.” And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son. And he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So they went both of them together. And Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So they went both of them together. When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built the altar there and laid the wood in order and bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “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.” And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called the name of that place, “The Lord will provide”; as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.” And the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven and said, “By myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.”

Of course we have a happy ending to this story when God reveals to Abraham that this was a test of His faith and provides a sacrifice in place of his son Isaac. In this story also we have a foreshadowing of the future sacrifice of God’s own son, for whom there will be no substitute.

Welcome to part 11 of our series “Finding Jesus through the Old Testament,” which I hope has been a blessing to you because we’re going all the way to summer with this one and picking it back up in the fall. What can I say? There’s a lot of references to Jesus in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Through this series we’ve been looking at three different ways that you can find Jesus in the Old Testament, types of Jesus that are people or things which in some way foreshadow the character and person of Jesus, prophecies that predict future events about Jesus and christophanies where Jesus shows up in a human like form before the incarnation.

Well what if I told you that this passage of scripture actually contains all three of these? Primarily we see in this passage how Isaac is a type of Christ, but we also have Abraham’s prophecy that “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering” and “On the mountain of the Lord it shall be provided.” Finally the angel of the Lord appears in this passage making it a possible Christophany.

It’s important to keep in mind with this text that Abraham lived before God gave the law. This means that there’s a lot about God’s morality that Abraham doesn’t know. It’s also not unheard of in the cultures of Abraham’s day to sacrifice children to show your devotion to a god. So Abraham probably believed that this was a genuine request, from what we can tell.

Abraham not only honors this request but appears to do so without any objection or hesitation. In fact we read that he “rose early in the morning” to listen to God. Why would Abraham obey so readily? Well one of the main messages of this text is how radically Abraham trusts God. Maybe he can’t understand why God would promise to give him uncountable descendants through Isaac specifically and then ask him to kill Isaac, but everything he knows about God teaches him that God is trustworthy and all powerful. So Abraham obeys God.

For our purposes today though we aren’t focused on the faithfulness of Abraham. Since this sermon series is “finding Jesus in the Old Testament” we’re focused on Isaac, because he is a type of Christ in this passage, who prefigures the sacrificial role that Jesus will one day play on behalf of all mankind.

I believe this passage shows us three things about Jesus:

Jesus is God’s Only Son, whom He loves

Jesus was Silent and Willing to be Sacrificed

Jesus is the Lamb that Will be Provided

1. Jesus is God's Only Son, Whom He Loves

Over and over again through this passage we see reminders that Isaac is Abraham’s only son. In verse 2 we read

Genesis 22:2 ESV

He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”

You sort of get the emphasis here, right? “Your son, your ONLY SON Isaac, WHOM YOU LOVE” and then almost every time the text refers to Isaac from here until the end of the story he’s referred to as “Isaac his son” or “Isaac your son” both referring to Abraham.

Likewise Jesus is God’s only son, whom He (God) loves. Consider Matthew 3:16-17

Matthew 3:16–17 ESV

And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

And even more directly related is John 3:16

John 3:16 ESV

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Now of course Isaac is not literally Abraham’s only son. Earlier in the account of Genesis we read about Sarah giving Abraham her female servant to bear him a son, who is Ishmael. Yet Isaac is called here his only son because he is uniquely the son of the promise. He is the son through which Abraham will have descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore. He is the descendant who will carry on the promise that God will bless all the nations through Him.

Likewise in a sense we are all children of God. Luke in fact ends his genealogy by calling Adam “the son of God.” Yet Jesus is uniquely the Son of God in a way that none of us could be. He is the Son of God who is in nature the same as God. We are mortal, He is immortal. He is also like Isaac the son of the promise. In fact Paul argues in Ga 3:16

Galatians 3:16 ESV

Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring to many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ.

So althought the promise continued in Isaac it found its ultimate fulfillment in Jesus.

So if Isaac and Jesus are both the beloved sons of their fathers than we can know that what Abraham felt about the prospect of sacrificing his son Isaac is what God the Father felt about actually sacrificing His son. No doubt both of them felt intense anguish and emotional suffering knowing what they had to do. The difference? Abraham was rescued from the need to actually experience killing his only son. God on the other hand followed through and Sacrificed His Son, feeling the pain of turning away from His Holy Son as the sin of the world was placed on Him. Feeling His pain in a way an earthly father could never do with His son, being of the same substance as Jesus.

2. Jesus was Silent and Willing to be Sacrificed

Now I want you to put yourself in Isaac’s shoes for a moment. Your dad says that he heard from God and that he needs to go make a sacrifice on a mountain three days journey away. So you pack up and leave with him and two of your families’ servants. Perhaps at this point you wonder why your father isn’t bringing any sheep with him. Maybe you assume he’s going to find an animal along the way or something. Three days later you arrive at the mountain and Abraham leaves the servants behind and asks you to carry the wood for the sacrifice. So you carry the wood and start to climb the mountain with him. There’s still no animal for the sacrifice. So you timidly ask your father about it and he tells you that “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering.”

Now from this point on we don’t get the emotional or verbal responses of Abraham or Isaac at this point, but what we’re told next is that Abraham binds Isaac and puts him on the wood. By that point Isaac had to know what Abraham was intending to do. The crazy thing? Isaac almost certainly submitted willingly to be sacrificed.

Think about it, the fact that Isaac could carry the wood for the sacrifice himself means he’s almost certainly capable of refusing his father and there wouldn’t be much that Abraham could do about it. Abraham was over 100 years old. Now maybe he was spry for his age, but even still a healthy young boy would easily fight back against a 100+ year old man.

This parallels the crucifixion, in that Jesus too silently allowed Himself to be sacrificed. In the words of Isaiah 53:7

Isaiah 53:7 (ESV)

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.

See Jesus could have easily defended himself against the charges that were being brought against Him. We see many places in the gospel where He outwits and outspeaks the Pharisees and others who try to trick Him and trap Him. He also could have at any moment used His power as God the Son or called upon the angels of heaven to intervene. Like Isaac Jesus must have submitted then to the sacrifice, though what sets Jesus apart is that Jesus was actually sacrificed. He actually died on that cross for our sake where Isaac was willing but did not actually suffer and die.

Isaac must have shared his father’s faith and trust in God. See an important principle of studying and interpreting the Bible is to interpret the Bible with the Bible, and we see in Hebrews 11:17-19 that Abraham obeyed God in part because he had faith that God could raise Isaac from the dead.

Hebrews 11:17–19 ESV

By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son, of whom it was said, “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.

We see this faith in what he says to his servants in Gen 22:5

Genesis 22:5 ESV

Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you.”

So we have to wonder if Abraham reassured Isaac in the moment that God was able to raise him again from the dead, or simply that God could be trusted to take good care of Isaac even in death. So even here we see foreshadowing of Jesus, in the fact that He went to the cross in the words of Hebrews 12:2 “for the joy set before him,” knowing that the resurrection would come and trusting God the father to take care of him.

Of course as it turns out Abraham’s expectation that Isaac would be killed and resurrected was not accurate, and instead we see that God did in fact provide the lamb, which brings us to point 3:

3. Jesus is the Lamb that Will be Provided

Genesis 22:7–8 ESV

And Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So they went both of them together.

Abraham of course had no idea the full significance of what he just said. We know from what we read before in Hebrews that Abraham believed that God was able to resurrect Isaac, so at this point it’s pretty reasonable to say that what he’s telling Isaac is either a comforting lie, just because Abraham is called righteous doesn’t mean he doesn’t sin and lie, or it’s a clever half truth alluding to the fact that it was God who provided him with his son Isaac. Either way we as Christians see a fuller significance to this phrase. Abraham himself seems to at least have partially clued into a spritual insight into the future in verse 14

Genesis 22:14 ESV

So Abraham called the name of that place, “The Lord will provide”; as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.”

The Lord will provide, On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided. Future tense. Which is odd considering he names it for something that has already happened. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to name the mountain “the Lord has provided?” or if you wanted to express a timeless principle you may have named the place “the Lord provides” in the present tense. Yet Abraham goes with the future tense statement “the Lord will provide.” And the saying that endures about this mountain is “it shall be provided.”

So this has a clear prophetic overtone. God will one day provide, and what He will provide is a lamb. A perfect lamb. Jn 1:29

John 1:29 ESV

The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!

God provided a lamb for us and His name was Jesus, confirmed to us by John the baptist in the Gospel of John the apostle. God did for us what He wouldn’t actually ask Abraham to do. See the clear parallel between Gen 22:12

Genesis 22:12 ESV

He said, “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.”

and Romans 8:32

Romans 8:32 ESV

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?

Paul clearly has this moment in mind when he wrote that passage. God gave up for us what He would never ask us to give up for Him, His only son. The greatest act of love and mercy in all of history.

We become Isaac, bound on the wood and ready to die for our sins when God calls out to stop the knife and provide the better sacrifice on our behalf.

Conclusion

Let’s be honest, there’s a lot of people that look at the story of the binding of Isaac and even the story of Jesus and are horrified by what they see. That God would ask Abraham to even for a moment believe that his son would have to die, and for God to ask Jesus to be tortured and killed to satisfy His justice.

What I see in these pages is a powerful love story. Not in a sentimental emotional way, but in a real love way. It’s in this passage that God reveals to us the powerful love that He has for us, love so powerful that He’s willing to do whatever it takes to save us from our sins and our just punishment.

We see that God is willing to sacrifice His own son, whom He dearly loves, for our sake. We see that God in the person of Jesus is willing to silently endure the pain of the cross and the pain of seperation from the father on our behalf. We also see that God is willing to make a way for us where we saw no way before.

What are we willing to sacrifice in return? Are you willing to repent and give your whole life to Jesus? To die to sin and live to Christ? To give up wealth and success? Because these are all things people have been called to do for the cause of Christ. When we look at what great a cost Jesus paid for us how can we say no if we hear God calling us to give up the things that we treasure for Him?

I invite you to pray a dangerous prayer for me. Ask God to search your heart and your life and ask Him, God is there anything you want me to give up to follow you?