God Will Provide The Lamb
Eastertide Sermons on the Vigil Texts • Sermon • Submitted
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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.
Genesis 22:
He is Risen! Alleluia! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!
We continue our journey through some of the deliverance texts that we heard at the Great Vigil of Easter. Today we look the text where God calls Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, his only son.
Some Biblical Background
Some Biblical Background
We are first introduced to Abraham in Genesis chapter 11. He was a wealthy man, rich in gold and in cattle. He lived a life of luxury in a city of the Chaldeans called “Ur”.
Before God calls Abraham, he was known as Abram, and his wife was known as Sarai.
In Chapter 12, God calls Abram and makes this promise to him:
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
Immediately, Abram and Sarai obey. In a sense, he does just what the disciples do when Jesus says to them, “Follow me.” This shows his great faith in God. The book of Hebrews puts it this way:
By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.
By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.
Hebrews 11:
This took a lot of faith. Leaving behind family, leaving behind wealth, leaving behind familiarity, simply trusting in a promise from God.
One problem. Abram and Sarai were barren, and they were old. They had no children. So how would God fulfill his promise using two 80 plus year old people that had no offspring? How would his offspring create a great nation? One needs heirs to make a nation if it is to have his bloodline.
While Abram and Sarai acted in faith, they had their moments of unbelief as well. Sarai, knowing that she was well beyond child-bearing years, thinks she has a solution to this. Ten years pass and Sarai still does not have a child. She convinces Abram to father a child with her maidservant, Hagar. That way, Abram could have offspring and God could fulfill His promise. So Hagar becomes pregnant and bears to him Ishmael.
Not. God’s. Plan. How often do we try to solve the mysteries of God ourselves? How often are we tempted to think that God notices us because we are good, and if we aren’t we have to try harder. So we turn his promise into our own work. There are a lot of ways we do this.
Really, Sarai’s actions, and Abram’s following through with them, are an act of unbelief, not trusting God’s Word for what it says. They thought that after 10 years the Lord forgot them. Not so. Our sense of timing and God’s promises are not linked together. Remember that. God functions in the perfect time.
God’s timing finally comes.
Genesis 17:
When Abram was ninety-nine years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you, and may multiply you greatly.” Then Abram fell on his face. And God said to him, “Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.
And God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall become nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.”
: 15-16
Thirteen years after Ishmael was born, God initiates circumcision as the sign of His covenant. And Sarah becomes pregnant.
Both Abraham and Sarah laughed about this. Abraham in Chapter 17; Sarah in Chapter 21:
And Sarah said, “God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh over me.”
So… the name “Laughter” was given to this son. In Hebrew: Isaac. “Yitz a hak”
God kept his promise. There was no need for Hagar and Ishmael. That was man’s idea, not God’s. Nevertheless, God blesses Ishmael. But he would not be the heir. There would be enmity between Israel and Ishmael from that time forward. By the way, Muhammed, who lived centuries later and who founded Islam in 622 A.D. considered Abraham to be the father of Islam through the line of Ishmael.
There are a lot of other instances in these chapters of Genesis describing Abraham and Sarah showing lack of faith and good judgment. While Abraham is even our Father, the evidence of the fall into sin dotted his life, and the lives of his family members as well. The miracle is that the Lord uses sinners to do His bidding here on earth. But there needs to be Sacrifice.
Sacrifice
Sacrifice
Now we get to our text.
God puts Abraham’s faith to an extreme test. He calls him to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice.
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.”
I remember preaching on this at Emanuel, Patchogue, when I was a pastor there. At the end of the service a woman came up to me and attempted to shame me for preaching on such a “horrible text”. “That’s child abuse!” My response, “No, that’s God’s Word!” Admittedly, in our eyes it may be a horrific thing that God requires. It is not a text that somehow condones child abuse and child sacrifice (which, by the way, the Lord strictly forbids!) But it is what God required of Abraham. We don’t neglect texts simply because they don’t fit our 21st Century “superiority” that is actually biblical ignorance. That being said, we look at what happens.
First, one must wonder what goes through Abraham’s mind. Remember the years of barrenness, then the 23 years of waiting for God to make good on the promise? Remember God telling Abraham that Ishmael was not the one through whom the promise would come? There’s only one son left. Isaac. And if Isaac is slain, Abraham is back to no offspring through whom God’s promise would be fulfilled. I wonder if that briefly went through Abraham’s mind . We do not know, God doesn’t tell us.
Perhaps it did. But that does not stop Abraham from following God’s command to a tee.
He takes the child, Isaac, with him to the Mountain that God would show them. He takes the wood to fuel the sacrifice. He takes the cord to bind the sacrifice. He takes the knife to slay the sacrifice. And he takes the fire to burn the sacrifice. Isaac notices something is missing:
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 binds Isaac, places him, bound, on the altar in strict obedience to God. And he raises his knife to slay 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.”
:
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.
There was no hesitation on Abraham’s part to obey God’s command. He would have carried it through to the end. But his faith in God’s promise and his obedience to the Lord .
There was no hesitation on Abraham’s part to obey God’s command. He would have carried it through to the end. But his faith in God’s promise and his obedience to the Lord .
Here we see what God demands in the First Commandment. “You shall have no other gods before me.”
Abraham illustrates to us what this means. Even those we love cannot come before the Lord in life. It is a hard lesson that we are all still learning. Because we won’t give up those things that we love that get in the way of our relationship with our Father, let alone a child! Our sin, our rebellion, our desires, our wants still seem to come before God an awful lot. We fail the test daily.
But God provides the solution.
The Lamb
The Lamb
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.
God Himself provides the Lamb. By the way a “ram” is an intact “male” lamb; a female is called a ewe. So this Ram is a Lamb.
Abraham offers this Lamb as a “burnt offering in place of his son.”
This account in Scripture certainly describes to us what true faith and obedience in God is all about. But there is something much deeper lying behind the curtain of God’s Word, which He opens for us with His Son Jesus Christ.
This is typology, pure and simple, that points us ahead to a Sacrifice to end all Sacrifices in place of God’s sons and daughters.
We should be the ones being sacrificed. We are Isaac. Except our sacrifice is earned and warranted by our dirty, sinful lives. But God stays the knife, and does not allow the pyre to be lit.
He takes us off the altar, and replaces us with His provided Lamb.
God the Father is the one who offers up His Son. There is no “staying of the slaying” now. God deals the pure death-blow to the provided Lamb. He’s bound to the altar with nails. The fire of hell consumes Him completely as He is given as an offering, in our place.
But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God,
Beloved, God has provided the Lamb for your, the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world, Jesus Christ. Caught in the thicket of our lives, He is both victim and priest. He is offered in your place. You are now off the altar and on the throne, faithful unto death receiving the crown of life.
That hope now is alive in you, given by the Holy Spirit. That Spirit who empowers us to put God first in everything. That endows us with holiness. That fills us with hope. Indeed, God has provided the Lamb.
He is Risen! Alleluia! He is Risen Indeed! Alleluia!