God Provides

The text before us today challenges us to our core. Trust and obey have their boundaries. Child sacrifice is a line that we can’t cross, or are we? Every parent has a desire or a dream for their children to be successful, according to the world. We bind them to the altar of money, education, extracurricular activities, busyness, anxiety, and society’s false deity. Sadly, many of these well-intention parents mean well because they want to provide for children what they didn’t have growing up.

But what would it look like if we offered our children to God? Are we willing to trust a God to provide for our every need?

In the story, God calls out to Abraham, and Abraham says, “Here I am.” Take your only son, the one you love so much, and sacrifice him. God allows Abraham to go to the very brink, where he would see his desperate need for the substitute which God will provide. Out of gratitude, Abraham names the place Jehovah-Jireh, which means “the Lord will provide.”

Similarly, Hannah prayed for a child and asked God countless times, and finally, he heard her plea, and she named her son Samuel, which meant “asked of God.” She then turned around and dedicated Samuel to God.

I want us to understand that God has provided everything we could ever need in our Savior, Jesus Christ. The first thing we must grasp is that we have a great need. If God had merely asked Abraham to go and sacrifice one of his lambs, he wouldn’t have felt the desperate need he felt when God asked him to sacrifice his son. This was a life and death matter. Of course, Isaac felt his great need, too! He would have died if God had not intervened. God allowed Abraham to raise the knife to slay his son, to show him his desperate need for a substitute.

This story teaches us some important truths about salvation. When approaching God, it must be with the right heart and by the blood of an acceptable sacrifice. Isaac had been to worship God before and understood that there needed to have an animal to sacrifice to God; that is why he asked his father where the lamb was.

Later, God would ordain through Moses the sacrificial system by which Israel was to approach Him. From the earliest times, God made it clear that without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins. God cannot just brush our sins under the rug, or He would compromise His holiness and justice. He has ordained that the penalty for sin is death, and He must exact that penalty.

Consider how Abraham felt as he lifted the knife to kill his beloved son! He must have felt overwhelmed by his desperate need before God. He must have thought, “Oh, God, why couldn’t it be a lamb? Why couldn’t it be me? Why must it be my only son, whom I love? Is my sin so great that only Isaac will suffice?” And think of how Isaac must have felt! Unless God provided a substitute, he would die!

God has to bring us all to that place of realizing our great needs. Our sin is so great that nothing other than the death of God’s own Son would suffice. The death of lambs could never atone for sin. They only pointed forward to the Lamb of God, who would take away the sins of the world.

When I first put my faith in Christ, I knew that I was sinful and that God is holy, but I had no idea of “the mighty gulf that God did span at Calvary.” That may be one danger of being raised in a Christian home, that we may not realize how much we’ve been forgiven and thus not love the Savior as powerfully as if we had felt “the rope around our neck.” The modern church goes overboard to tell us how to love and value ourselves. But the Bible shows us the depth of our great need as sinners so that we will appreciate God’s excellent provision in the Savior.

Another truth of our salvation is that God has provided a great Savior. Only God can provide a Savior for our great need.

Abraham’s desperate situation showed him that only God could meet his need. If God had not intervened at the precise moment He did, Isaac would have been killed. Abraham offered the ram God provided “in the place of his son” so that Isaac was spared (22:13). As the apostle Paul wrote, “For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly” (Rom. 5:6).

The place where this sacrifice took place is significant. God could have told Abraham to sacrifice his son somewhere closer to Beersheba, where he lived. But He directed him to the land of Moriah, to one of the mountains there. The only other place in the Bible where Moriah appears is 2 Chronicles 3:1, where it is stated that Solomon built the temple on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. In Abraham’s day, this spot was uninhabited. But it would later be where sacrificial lambs would be offered at the temple.

Like Abraham, we must come to the place God has appointed, to the cross of Jesus Christ. At the cross, God provided everything the sinner needed to be reconciled to Him. All we can do is thankfully receive by faith what He provided.

Lastly, The Savior God has provided is His only Son, whom He loves. The ram provided by God represents Christ, who died in our place. But Isaac is also a type of Christ. Whereas Isaac was spared death, Christ died in our place. But God allowed Abraham to go right up to the point of killing Isaac to illustrate the fact that He would one day sacrifice His own Son for the sin of the world.

Just as Jesus would one day bear His cross up that same hill, Isaac bore the wood for the sacrifice on his shoulders. Just as Jesus willingly gave Himself in obedience to the Father (John 10:17-18; Eph. 5:2), so Isaac willingly submitted to his Father. We don’t know how old Isaac was, but he was at least old enough to carry the wood. Probably he was strong enough to resist his elderly father if he had tried. But his willing submission shows his trust in God and his father. In Abraham’s mind, Isaac was as good as dead for three days (22:4), before he was raised from that altar, just as Jesus was actually in the tomb three days before He was raised.

Just as Abraham carried the fire and knife, the implements of death, and would have plunged the knife into the heart of his own son, so there is a sense in which God the Father put His own Son to death. Isaiah wrote of Christ that He was “smitten of God,” and that “the Lord was pleased to crush Him, putting Him to grief; if He would render Himself as a guilt offering, ...” (Isa. 53:4, 10). John 3:16 makes it clear that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son. Just as Abraham loved Isaac, and it pained him deeply to think of killing him, so the Father loved the Son but offered Him up for us all.

Why? “God so loved” us that He gave His Son to die in our place! Probably no one appreciates what that means like Abraham did after he received Isaac back from the altar. Nothing was more precious to Abraham than Isaac. Nothing could have cost the Father more than to give His sinless Son as the penalty for our sin.

Like Abraham, we must believe that God will fulfill his promises regardless of our circumstances, for success is assured to those who love God (Rom. 8:28). To offer our children to God is to agree to let go of the reins and give God the space to fulfill His promise of success. The prosperity and success that God promises will always come on God's terms and not according to worldly interpretation of these terms.

Just as we covet the moment that a child snuggles against us or kisses us on the cheek, so God covets those moments when we come offering him our time—our money—our affection—our adoration—evidence of our love. All that we have are as children’s trinkets to God, but those trinkets become precious to him as they show him our love. God needs only our hearts.

This morning, examine your life. What do you love more than God? Is it money—or family—or pleasure? What God asks of us is that we love him more than all these things. That is what Abraham did when he offered to sacrifice Isaac. When we can honestly say that we love nothing more than God, he will heap blessings and honors on us, just as he did Abraham. Try him and see.