God Will Provide Himself a Lamb

This is the hardest chapter in Genesis and the one most argued over since. A father is told to kill his son. He gets up early. He does not argue. He walks three days with the boy carrying the wood. And nobody who reads it honestly gets to the ram without first standing beside a man with a knife in his hand. Read it whole, with the one sentence in Abraham's mouth that most retellings skip, and it becomes the clearest window in the Old Testament onto what God would one day do Himself.

Take now thy son

"Tempt" is the King James word for test; the narrator tells us in the first verse that it is a test, so that we know something Abraham did not. And listen to how God names the boy: thy son, thine only son, Isaac, whom thou lovest. Four times, each closer. This is the child of the laughter, twenty-five years waited for, the one through whom every promise had to come. And the command is "get thee," the same two words that pulled Abraham out of Ur. The first "get thee" cost him his past. This one asks for his future.

"And Abraham rose up early in the morning" (22:3). He does not bargain, though he had bargained with God over Sodom. He does not tell Sarah; the text is silent about her, and so, plainly, was he. He cuts the wood himself. Three days' walk, which is three days of knowing.

We will come again to you

Here is the sentence people leave out, and it is the key to the whole chapter. At the foot of the mountain Abraham tells the servants: "Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you" (22:5). We will come again. Both of us. He says it before he climbs. Either he is lying to the servants, or he believes something. The writer of Hebrews says he believed something, and says what: "Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure" (Hebrews 11:19). Accounting. Reasoning. Abraham had done arithmetic. God had said, in Isaac shall thy seed be called. God had said, offer Isaac. Both from the same God, who does not lie. Therefore Isaac would come down the mountain, and if he had to die to do it, God would raise him.

That is not the Abraham of the famous modern reading, the knight who must abandon reason to obey. It is a man who took two promises from the same mouth, refused to let go of either, and concluded the only thing that let both stand. The faith was not in place of the thinking. The faith was the thinking, done all the way to the end.

Where is the lamb?

"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" (22:6). The son carries the wood up the hill. The father carries the fire and the knife. And Isaac, who is old enough to carry a load of firewood up a mountain, and therefore old enough to run, asks the question: "My father… Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" (22:7).

God will provide Himself a lamb. Read it either way the English allows, God will provide, for Himself, a lamb; or God will provide Himself, as the lamb; and both are true, and the second one took two thousand years to come clear. Then: they went both of them together. The narrator says it twice. Isaac heard the answer and kept walking beside his father. Whatever he understood, he did not run.

"And Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son" (22:9-10). Bound. A grown boy, bound by an old man. He let himself be tied. The knife is in the air. And the text does not hurry.

Jehovah-jireh

"And the angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I. And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad… for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me" (22:11-12). His name, twice, the way God says a name when there is no time to lose. And then the ram, "caught in a thicket by his horns" (22:13), and offered "in the stead of his son." A substitute, on that hill, on that day. Abraham names the place for it: "Jehovahjireh: as it is said to this day, In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen" (22:14). The LORD will provide. It shall be seen. Future tense, both of them. He knew the ram was not the end of the sentence.

And the promise is given back, sworn now, and enlarged: "By myself have I sworn, saith the LORD, for because thou hast done this thing… in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice" (22:16-18). James points at this hill when he says faith was "made perfect" by works (James 2:22): not that the walk earned anything, but that the believing under the stars in chapter 15 was shown to be the real thing on the mountain in chapter 22. It walked.

Where this lands

The mountain has a name, and the Bible does not let you forget it. "Then Solomon began to build the house of the LORD at Jerusalem in mount Moriah" (2 Chronicles 3:1). The temple stood where the ram died. And just outside the wall of that same city, a Father did what Abraham was spared. "He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all" (Romans 8:32). Spared not: Paul is quoting Genesis 22:12 back at God. This time the angel did not call out. This time the knife fell.

And the Son carried the wood. "And he bearing his cross went forth" (John 19:17). A grown Son who could have run, who let Himself be bound, who went with His Father all the way up, "the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1:29). Where is the lamb, Isaac asked. God will provide Himself a lamb, his father said, and did not know how completely he was telling the truth. In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen. It was. Abraham reasoned that God was able to raise the dead, and received his son back in a figure; the Father did raise the dead, on the third day, and gave the Son back not in a figure but in the flesh, to everyone who will walk up the hill with Him and not run.

Related: The Binding of Isaac (the commentators arguing, Augustine against Kierkegaard), Get Thee Out, The Atonement, and Kierkegaard. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple.