My favorite Old Testament story is found in Genesis 22. It is the well-known story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah, in obedience to YHWH’s command to him.
This story has great significance in the narrative of Genesis, in the flow of redemptive history, and in the theology of both the Old and New Testaments.
Jesus Christ is beautifully typified in the course of the narrative and the New Testament writers use this story to make theological points thousands of years after the events of Genesis 22.
The story of Genesis 22 is profitable to us in its ability to teach and train us in righteousness and to foreshadow the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The Context of Genesis 22
First, let’s look at the background leading up to the story in Genesis 22.
God called Abram to follow Him to a land of promise (Gen. 12:1). Abram departed from his family’s dwellings in Haran and sojourned in the land of Canaan. God made promises to Abram: promises of blessing (Gen. 12:2-3), promises of land (Gen. 13:15, 15:7, 15:18, 17:8), and promises of seed or offspring (Gen. 13:16, 15:4-5, 17:5-6).
While we don’t have the space here to fully flesh this out, these promises were restorative promises to all of humanity. The promises of land, seed, and blessing were intimately tied to the fall and redemption of humanity that was recorded and promised in Genesis 3. In Genesis 1:28, God “blessed” the Man and Woman but their sin brought curses. They were exiled from the direct presence of God in Eden (Gen. 3:23-24). And there was a curse upon their fertility. Both the seeds in the ground and the growth and birth of human seed was affected by Adam’s sin. However, the promise of redemption took the form of the “seed of the Woman” (Gen. 3:15) who would crush the head of the serpent.
Now, these redemptive promises are given to Abram. He will be blessed and will himself be a blessing to the nations. He will be fruitful and multiply and his offspring will fill the earth. And to these offspring, the land of Canaan would be given.
To make a longer story short, these promises continue being repeated and clarified in more precise terms until we read this in Genesis 21:12: “…for through Isaac shall your offspring be named.”
Isaac is the child of promise, the seed of the woman through whom these blessings promised to Abram (now Abraham) were to flow.
And then something very unexpected happens.
Testing
In Genesis 22:1-2 God calls to Abraham and says this: “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.”
This can’t possibly be. God has finally fulfilled His promise of a son to Abraham after so many long years of waiting. And now He’s demanding that Abraham sacrifice Isaac?
It would have been jarring enough if God had told Abraham to sacrifice his son. But that’s not all. He says, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love,“. The ESV (quoted here) inserts the name of Isaac after “your only son” but the NASB is perhaps closer to the order of the original Hebrew when it reads, “Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac,”.
This establishes a gut-wrenching progression. God is commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son. But not just his son, his only son. And not just his only son, but the son whom he loves. And not only all this, but this is Isaac, the very child of promise!
Now, of course, Isaac is not Abraham’s only physical son. Ishmael is also a son of Abraham. But God makes it clear here in v. 2 that He regards Abraham as only having one true son: Isaac.
The practice of child-sacrifice was sadly common in Canaan at that time. Perhaps God was showing His true colors to Abraham here? Maybe He was just like the other violent gods of the Canaanites who delighted in children being killed on their altars. But we must remember that this is not what actually happened. (More on this below.) Furthermore, the Bible tells us explicitly that God wished to test Abraham (v. 1). James tells us that the testing of our faith produces steadfastness (Jas. 1:2-4).
What are we to do when our faith is tested? We are to count it all joy and remain steadfast, James says.
And yet, the circumstance of Abraham and Isaac is a very difficult one. Not only is God testing the faith of Abraham through an emotionally difficult circumstance of facing the loss of his son, He is testing Abraham’s faith in His promises.
For indeed, how can Isaac fulfill all the promises of God to Abraham if he is dead and burned up on an altar? And Genesis has made it quite clear by this point that there is no “plan B” if Isaac is lost. (Remember Genesis 21:12 which explicitly links Isaac to the promises.)
Faith Walks
So what does Abraham do in the face of this test? (Which, by the way, he doesn’t yet know is a simple test.)
He walks. He sets out on his journey with Isaac, a few servants, and the necessary supplies for an offering to YHWH. On the third day, they reach their destination and Abraham makes a striking statement:
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.”
Genesis 22:5
Abraham tells his servants that both he and Isaac will return to them after they worship God. Is this naivety on Abraham’s part? Is he attempting to put on a bright face and hide what he is about to do? Or is there something deeper going on here?
Abraham was a great man of faith, although this identity was shaped over many years of failure and faithlessness. It is helpful to read the New Testament when interpreting the Old Testament and what we read in Hebrews 11:19 helps us to understand Abraham’s statement in Genesis 22:5.
He considered that God is able to raise people even from the dead, from which he also received him back as a type.
Hebrews 11:19, NASB
Here, the author of Hebrews clarifies what Abraham’s faith was in. Faith is only as good as its object. No amount of faith will make a one-legged chair hold me. If I am to have faith in the chair, it must be a “faithful” chair. It must actually be able to hold me. So what was Abraham’s faith in? We could come up with a couple of answers but they all would boil down to essentially this: Abraham had faith in God’s ability to keep His promises, even if that required raising the dead.
I do not believe that Abraham’s statement to his young men in v. 5 should be taken as a lonely, falsely-optimistic ploy. Instead, I believe we should read it as a profession of faith in the ability of God to raise the dead and fulfill His promises no matter what. It is a statement of faith in an all-powerful and all-faithful God who will accomplish the purposes He has set out to do.
And this kind of faith is what enables Abraham to saddle his donkey, cut the wood, and take the long journey to Mount Moriah. That is not to say that it wasn’t hard for him to understand God’s intentions or that he never questioned God during those long miles. It is to say though, that Abraham’s faith led him to walk, just as it had back in ch. 12.
Faith is not based on circumstances. It is based on the promise and power of God.
God Will Provide a Lamb
In Genesis 22:7, Isaac asks the obvious question. By now, it’s just him and his father. And there is no sacrificial lamb in sight.
Now, the ESV translates the Hebrew word na’ar in v. 5 as “boy” but it could also be translated “lad” (as in the NASB) or some other equivalent of “young man”. (In fact, the word for “young men” used to describe Abraham’s servants is also na’ar.) When we do the math with the information available to us in the text of Genesis, we can estimate that Isaac was probably between 13 and 37 years old when this event took place.
In that case, Isaac was not under Abraham’s physical authority. Abraham by this time would be well over one-hundred years old. An adolescent or young adult like Isaac would easily have been able to overpower this old man and defend himself. But that is not what happens as we read later on in v. 9 where Abraham binds Isaac and lays him on the altar.
Before Abraham’s actions in v. 9, he assures his son that “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering”.
And indeed, God does.
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.
Genesis 22:10-13
We cannot ignore or miss the significance found in these verses. The author of Hebrews equates this substitute for Isaac as Isaac’s resurrection (Heb. 11:19). Abraham offered the ram as an offering “instead of his son”. The ram takes the place of Isaac as an offering to God.
The full development of the “burnt offering” will not come until Leviticus 1 but we may conclude from Abraham’s earlier comments about “worship” in v. 5 that the purpose of the offering does not fundamentally change between Genesis 22 and Leviticus.
In Leviticus, the ascension offering (translated as “burnt” offering in many English Bibles) was an offering of atonement and worship before the Lord. It enabled a person to enter into God’s holy presence to enjoy communion with Him through vicarious atonement (see Leviticus 1).
In seed form, therefore, we see in Genesis 22 the promise of God’s provision of a sacrifice who will provide cleansing and atonement in the place of God’s people. This is the great significance of this passage in a typological sense. Abraham and Isaac are, without even knowing it, portraying a picture of God’s redemptive work through Christ.
Isaac is a type of Christ. A foreshadowing of Jesus.
Jesus Christ is the true only son of the Father, full of grace and truth (John 1:14). He is the one whom the Father loves dearly (Matt. 3:17). And He is the one through whom all the promises of God find their fulfillment (2 Cor. 1:20). He is the propitiation of our sins, the one who suffered the wrath of God on sin in our place (1 John 4:10). Like Isaac, he did not resist but he submitted to the will of His Father (Phil. 2:5-8, Isa. 53:7).
This event in Genesis 22 looks ahead to the provision of the true Lamb of God who atones for the sin of the world (John 1:29). This is confirmed in the next few verses:
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.”
Genesis 22:14-18
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.
God restates His promises to Abraham but these take a striking turn in v. 18. God does not promise that Abraham’s seed (Hebrew word zerah) will possess the gates of their enemies. He speaks of Abraham’s seed in the singular. In this singular seed, the nations of the earth will be blessed. The New Testament picks up this exact reference in two places: Acts 3:25 and Galatians 3:16. In the latter passage, Paul explicitly tells the Galatians that all the way back on Mount Moriah, God was talking about Jesus Christ.
Above, I asked the proverbial question about God being a cruel lover of child sacrifice. And I noted that first of all, no child sacrifice happened on Mount Moriah in the day of Genesis 22. Instead, God provided another way. In a sense, God was setting Himself apart from the gods of the Canaanites by showing Abraham that He did not delight in child sacrifices but would actually go out of His way to provide propitiation for His own wrath. He would provide a substitute.
A Glorious Picture of Redemption
Genesis 22 delivers to us a beautiful story, dripping with drama, and filled with typological and theological richness.
I don’t have space for it here in this article but I fully intend to do a follow-up “part two” very soon to explore how the New Testament interprets this passage and its significance for salvation by grace through faith.
Consider this article as the “typology” focused installment with another one riding its coattails that will deal more in-depth with the “obedience of faith” aspect.
This passage just has too much great depth, glory, and beauty to be contained in one article so we must settle for two (at least). In a point of final application, I encourage you to do two things:
First, I encourage you to remain steadfast in your faith through the stormy circumstances of life. These sufferings are where our faith is tested. And remember, it does not depend on the strength of your faith, but instead on the strength of the one in whom you have placed your faith and trust. Just as Abraham trusted that God could raise his son from the dead, so too you can have faith in the power of God displayed through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Second, glorify God and worship Him for His provision of a lamb. Christianity is the only religion in the world that is built on the reality of a God who gives Himself to save His sinful people. All other religions require us to make our own way to God. The God of the Bible has come to us. He became flesh to dwell among us (John 1:14) and He came to save the world, not to condemn it (John 3:16-17). Rest in that freedom and live in thanksgiving to God for His abundant provision of our greatest need: the need for redemption from the bondage of sin and for atonement and cleansing to escape the just wrath of God that we deserved.